“The Feathered Bough” by Stephen J. Clark (preview) by ZAGAVA

The

Feathered Bough Stephen J. Clark

The

Feathered Bough

The

Feathered Bough Stephen J. Clark

MMXVIII

The Feathered Bough by Stephen J. Clark First ZAGAVA® edition published and edited by Jonas J. Ploeger in the spring of 2018 Text: © by Stephen J. Clark All illustrations: © by Stephen J. Clark Text set in Minion Pro Titles set in Filosofia Design and typeset by Jan-Marco Schmitz All rights reserved. www.zagava.de ISBN 978-3-945795-14-9

‘Dream is a second life.’ Gérard de Nerval

From A Forgotten Land

The Colony

III

The Night Sermon

Silence Speaks

The War Inside

Mr Gentle

55 65

VII

To the Cavern of Roses

VIII

The House of Names

IX X

Voices across the Abyss The House of Masks

At the Grotto of The Crossing

143

167

XIII

The Dreaming Map

XIV

Malfreyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Strategem

115

129

Hypnos and Orpheus XII

Visions from the Shock Room

193

173 181

chapter i

From A Forgotten Land Dr Rudkin’s Journal, 28th October 1954 ‘Words haunt the world. Their words haunt the world through me. Their voices flock to me. They nest in my skull and with their inked beaks write on my skin. I am becoming their living book. I am The Feathered Bough. And it is this sacred book I must show you, doctor. We will set down these pages together.’ (Transcript of Tape 0.01, 11:10am, 21st December 1953) That was what the patient said to me after finally breaking his silence. He told me that he heard voices; they instructed him in the form of prophecies. They told him he was to be their messenger and that is why he asked to be locked away. Who were these creatures that he believed were trying to possess him and drive him from his senses? As I transcribed

The Feathered Bough

his story it slipped through my fingers. Would the patient’s vision always remain unfinished and just out of reach? Nerval was not his real name. He claimed that was the name his masters gave him. It was an old tradition they upheld, he said, to baptise the deceased the moment they set foot in their world; for Nerval believed that he was already dead and the hospital in which we administered his care was an obstacle to his deliverance; a purgatory or limbo. Furthermore this old man who refused to disclose or could not remember his true name persisted in an obsession to the detriment of everything else in life. He drew pictures and wrote stories about an imaginary land as if it existed. He claimed to travel there every night in his sleep and return each morning with visions to proclaim. He believed he was in exile from that lost world and longed to go back. To observers it was all the proof they needed; he was overwhelmed by a mania that isolated him from reality. He placed all hope in his art; his life depended upon piecing together a puzzle no one else could grasp. In his desperate search he turned to me for help in reconstructing that world in the form of a book. What others saw as madness was for him a way of understanding. How long had he been alone in that secret exile? One could only ask how far anyone could go on without sustenance from peers … without kinship. He had lived in a mute wilderness with that vision burning in his head like a beacon. His imagined world was all crumbling walls and broken statues; a derelict Eden, a hidden world perpetually on the cusp of decline. He called it the Hortus Palatinus—a refuge from the world that tormented him, yet a place to which he had to embark upon a final voyage. He’d been called upon to serve the masters of that dreamt place; he called them the Great Rooks. I came to understand that for him the book was not only a guide to that imaginary world yet a way of summoning and restoring it. And for me, it offered the perfect opportunity and raw material for my analytical work. It was a grimoire, he told me, a book of magic, of enchantment and seduction. All of his dreams and nightmares were documented

From A Forgotten Land

there and shadows of other far older stories leaked through its pages and drawings. There were striking similarities between Nerval’s drawings and examples of art published by the early psychiatric innovator Hans Prinzhorn, possessing qualities often believed to be visionary and mediumistic in character. Like that work, they had an obsessive, untutored quality about them. In conversation Nerval stated that he considered the act of drawing as a way of tapping into, conjuring or communing with the ancestral spirits of his imaginary realm, his hermetic heartland. He believed his work or method was comparable to a quest to find who he had once been, perhaps in a former life or in childhood. Yet above all there is one memorable observation that Nerval made that I easily recollect; referring to the book we were about to embark upon creating together he had this to say: ‘This will be my afterlife … the hallucination I hope to have in my final moments … the last thing I will see before death … my death-dream, my vision of Paradise.’ Beyond the great forest bordering the Hortus Palatinus, through tunnels and ancient caverns he promised to guide me to a place half-remembered, some kind of institute or school on a mountain strewn with ruins, that place he called Featherbough. Someone awaited him there and depended upon his return, yet he would not reveal much more than that. He would say that I was not ready to hear that part of the story he had yet to dream. From the outset the patient had refused to recline on the couch by the bookcase, instead preferring to sit upright in the chair in the centre of my room. He would bring with him many crumpled sheaves of paper and pages haphazardly bound together, which he would spread out on the floor before him. This was his sacred book; a work he claimed was nearing completion yet seemed to perpetually change. He tended to carry it with him, or at least sections of it, concealed on his person wherever he went and at times it would inexplicably seem either bulkier or slimmer than it had previously been. ‘How should I speak of that other place, Dr Rudkin?’ Nerval’s tone had been unsure, speaking after months of

From A Forgotten Land

muteness. When he struggled to speak I encouraged him to draw. ‘Aurélia; she waits for us on the other side, in Featherbough,’ he said, with a wonder that did not belong in the eyes of a grown man. ‘Her face seems familiar to you, no?’ ‘No, I don’t think so. Should it be?’ There was a flicker of recognition but the lines of the face were rendered in such an open way that they invited empathy. He had grown accustomed to my methods and no longer demanded to read the notes that I constantly made or to hear the tapes I sometimes recorded of our sessions. He seemed to view me more as an editor than his doctor, as if my role was to transcribe his proclamations. It was another tool to keep him talking. ‘We occupy the same room and yet it is as though we speak to one another from a great distance. So we’ll build a bridge to span the gulf that divides us. We’ll create a book between us, gathering its pages together. Word by word, picture by picture we’ll map the way back to that forgotten land. In making this book we will be rousing ancient spirits who will come to watch and witness. Yet we must be vigilant for enemy spies are all around us. ’ Nerval’s speech was often accompanied by precise gestures; small movements with his fingers and hands as if engaged in a sign language of his own devising. He made the other patients nervous and that was why I had to work towards securing further privacy for him. ‘How should I speak of that other place? Where should I begin Dr Rudkin?’ He said in hushed tones as if responding to my own cautious thoughts. I told him to begin at the beginning but he laughed and shook his head. When I suggested that he should read from his manuscript he nervously shuffled the pages, clearing his throat yet never raised his voice far above a whisper. ‘Then I’ll begin:

The Feathered Bough

The Feathered Bough A memoir and grimoire of a journey by Gérard de Nerval. I awoke on a path deep in the heart of a wood, with my head still ringing and my hands covered with blood. The voice which stirred me was more than birdsong. The path simply appeared. There was nothing before, only trees … trees all around and the thin trail threading its way, leading onwards. It was twilight when I reached a fork in the path. Although bewildered and afraid, the dusk stirred an odd kind of longing in me, spurring me on to take the left hand way, the path northwards. I remember nothing of what went before. If it was amnesia then that was only part of their game. If I’d been injured then everyone I met there, in that strange school, Featherbough, must have suffered the same. No one, not even the pupils, could remember their true names or where they’d come from, or for that matter what had led them to that place. No, our memories were taken from us in sleep, stolen away with the beating of great wings over the trees. Near sleep the name of that place still returns as an incantation, I write it again and again … Featherbough … Featherbough … Featherbough. Their words haunt the world.’ Yet, what and where is Featherbough? Spectral Featherbough … dreaming Featherbough … Hidden somewhere in the ancient walled gardens and plateaus of the Hortus Palatinus, its ruins scattered through the trees, foundations collapsing into pools, walls pulled apart by ivy fingers, its edges gnawed by fog advancing through the twilight. Its libraries and treasures tumble down overgrown paths, its statuary ponder in unknown corners. Featherbough is a dream I invoke with these words … ritual games in which I piece together traces … I sift through the dirt and reconstruct forgotten artefacts. Piece by piece I imagine where I have been so that I can return to the lost domain … the heart of those great walled gardens where all paths converge to be obliterated and dispersed once more.’

From A Forgotten Land

Featherbough has left its mark on me. Now it will leave its mark upon you. When my voice fails and I take up my pen to draw, another power works its influence through me, through the vessel of my body. My fingertips are pulled by inky threads. I draw these pictures as if feeling blindly along contours, my fingers finding nooks and crannies of an unknown world. These pictures chart a way back, a path into that place and reveal events unravelled from some greater pattern … do these drawings form a map of sorts where my words are scattered, worked loose from the fabric?’ So often I become mute, overwhelmed by their words. Do they truly want me to speak of them or simply keep their secrets? I feel their voices welling up; they silence me. I am their mute. Am I to be their messenger? I have become their witness, their familiar, their fetch. Every soul there in Featherbough is their servant, compelled to serve their unseen masters, the Great Rooks. I have become their conduit, channelling their memories. I am their seer, their scribe, their illuminator. I am a custodian of their history. They have sent me back here as their emissary. I have come to spread their word to this world. I pass between this world and theirs like a pendulum, like a hypnotist’s watch on its chain, swinging from sleep into waking and back again. The drawings arrive under my inkstained hands as if delivered, as if slipped under the door. Whispers pour from my own mouth when I least expect them to. What are these traces they’ve left in me? All their lessons and rituals return to me at night, calling me back. These words are coordinates in search of a map … a book … this book will lead me back to them … to the masters of Featherbough, those ancient cruel birds. • ‘Nerval, this place you speak of … Featherbough, is it an institute of some kind?’ I interrupted his ecstasy while reaching to examine a drawing on one of the pages he held in his hand, feeling the scored texture of the page under my thumbs. A slight trace of ink transferred to my skin.

The Feathered Bough

‘Are you trying to trick me? Yes perhaps that is it; their world lies in parallel to this one. Yes you are right, doctor. There is no real difference between here and there, between now and then. That place is hidden under this one. That place is a curious double, a mirror, a reflection in water like Usher’s house reaching out from some other hidden place. Yes I remember. This place in which I sit with you now, this hospital … it’s all scattered through the trees there too. It is an old ruin there. I am awake now yet how long have I been asleep? Where is the House of Names I’ve heard them whisper about; the marshlands and silent canals where their strange ceremonies take place? The creatures there speak about me as if I had known them before and yet I still cannot be sure of my own name. ‘Finding that world was like stumbling across a message by chance; a stranger’s letter in a second-hand book. They said that I was simply answering their call and yet what kind of invitation could allow a host to conceal their intentions, even in the thoughts and memories of their guest? It was a summons then to fulfil a duty that I had yet to understand. They still speak to me when I am alone in my bed at night. You must come to me, doctor, you must come and keep watch with me and hear them whisper that word in your ear too.’ I encouraged him to return to reading his manuscript to me. He seemed to be becoming agitated and I thought that reading might help distract his thoughts and soothe him. I hoped too that the material he had suppressed in his unconscious mind might surface and reveal itself in indirect ways. I looked for parallels and symbols, always. •

From A Forgotten Land

The Feathered Bough (continued) I pushed on through the quiet wood thinking that I was alone when, at the turning of the path I spied someone ahead, the slight frame telling me that it was a child. I called out to the waif. In answer I heard older, stranger echoes, utterances from roots, voices of primordial breath. Utterances that revive lost dreams. With these words we haunt the world … we summon ancient forms, coaxing them to surface … calling shadows from the edges of the conceivable. At the turning and branching of the paths there are conspiratorial whispers, our guides in the untamed night. There’ll be laughter in the darkness as we enter the gates of the old garden; laughter as another kind of speech. Who will we call from the margins? Whose burning masks will light the way? What was my name? The name I had before—can you tell me? And this name they gave me; Nerval, is it an incitement … to spread their madness? I am a boy with an old man’s mind. Was it always so? How am I so suddenly ancient? Who will act as my memory? How did I escape them? And yet I never wanted to leave. When did they find me wandering the edges? How old was I then? How old am I now? I still see myself walking the paths again … the paths toward that great gate in the trees. Was that me? Even on those secluded paths the wind’s voice still whispered there, at once both ancient and innocent. And like the breath of the wind I became an ancient innocent too. In making us shiver at its sound did it stir in us the first inklings of speech? In speaking did we aspire to become the wind, words snaking from our mouths to burn the night with incandescent signs? These are the questions they awakened in me. And once awakened I knew I would never rest. They opened the world’s secret mirrors in me and I found myself whispering back at them. In Featherbough it is the children who teach. We learned to make masks and composed incantations and

The Feathered Bough

carved votive offerings to leave on the thresholds of Featherbough. Those effigies, those talismans were our intermediaries, between the world of Men and that of the Great Rooks. So, I followed the lad along the forest path as it turned this way and that, growing ever darker and mustier. For a second he turned to see his pursuer and in that moment I saw that he wore a mask; a mask of roots and leaves. It was as though this young ghost knew that I followed him and yet did not want to acknowledge me. Again and again he slipped from view only for me to catch a glimpse again, as I gained ground at each turn. Then just as I was close enough to hear his quick feet padding on the bed of mulched leaves and just as I reached out a hand in the gloom the path slid away once more and he was gone, disappeared, leaving the trail ahead empty and silent. Only once I’d stopped did I become aware once more of the pain pounding in my head. I stood there breathless awhile, doubled over and trembling. Then from the trees I heard a voice calling to me. ‘Remember … remember the great old garden … the Hortus Palatinus … the gates are just ahead. Let me show you the way,’ the mask said. And it went on: ‘Please sir, please take me back to the school, to Featherbough where I belong.’ ‘What? Where am I?’ I said. Then in a sly voice it replied, ‘Why don’t you wear me and find out?’ I took the mask from the branches but dismissed its plea. It is not every day you find yourself talking to a mask. I asked a question; ‘Where am I?’ ‘You’re near the gate … you may as well enter.’ ‘And what exactly is this Featherbough?’ ‘What does the word suggest to you?’ ‘You mean as a name, the name of a place? What does that matter? What difference would it make what it suggested to me? I only need to know where I am … how I came to be here.’ The mask didn’t answer and I walked on with it in my hands, its face beneath my own. ‘Moments ago there was someone else here, a boy, I followed him here.’

From A Forgotten Land

‘Did you indeed? And yet the pupils aren’t allowed outside the gates. No one is,’ the mask hissed. ‘Do you know him? Did he leave you out there on that branch?’ ‘Now, why would he do such a thing?’ ‘I don’t know, maybe it’s a custom, or perhaps he was afraid and wanted to be rid of you.’ ‘You’re observant, I’ll give you that.’ ‘I’m also curious, yet you’re reluctant to give straight answers.’ ‘That’s just the nature of my kind, I’m afraid; of masks. We are grown from very old roots that reach deep and wide, drinking from sources unknown to mortal man. Answers don’t come easily to us. Our masters the Rooks made us as a kind of joke, much like the rest of their kingdom, although laughter was far from their minds.’ ‘The Rooks? Who are the Rooks? And you said that boy was a pupil; a pupil of what … of where?’ ‘Of Featherbough, of course … and here we are,’ said the mask as high iron gates to a great garden loomed before us in the half-light.