When you die, people put your possessions in the street. The rotten furniture that only you loved, a cardboard box full of trinkets, a mattress on its side. The items sit in the rain until someone takes them away, including the trashman. The once chosen objects clutter up the sidewalk to be sniffed at by dogs or eyed by hyperactive children, looking for something to climb. We aren’t buried like pharaohs anymore.
I used to work at a second-hand record and bookstore, the kind of place where children off-load their dad’s record collection not long after a funeral; or you find an inscription in a book, written with love, for a relationship that has had its own burial. Ghost objects, haunted by their former uses, waiting to be reborn in another’s hands.
“What if magic exists and nobody believed in it?” A five-year old said, in passing, as if drawing attention to a genuine and repeated adult concern. I believe in magic. Not the bunny rabbit out of the top-hat kind of magic but the glimpses of otherwise unknown forces behind people and things that connect you to something bigger than yourself. Magic is not just something conjured out of nothing. The folded corner of a page bookmarked in a novel, a note on the kitchen table that says, “honey, darling,” the way music sounds when you are dancing.
The five-year old is a friend’s son and he is a long way off from the disappointments of adulthood stealing his magic. He utters statements that make the grown-ups feel not very grown-up at all. “Isn’t this wonderful?” is often directed at a simple pastime, no longer seen as wondrous, and it doesn’t seem naive. The intervening years blunt the perceptions of the bigger people to make them lacking, which isn’t the traditional perspective on maturity. Maybe the steady crawl towards having your own possessions thrown out into the street, begins with the removal of a belief in magic, so hang onto it.
Christian Martius (2022)
Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Toronto
(for Janel)
In my imagination, most people go to Amsterdam to get high or get laid. I like to think of myself as someone who is above such primitive desires. I went to Amsterdam for the art.
Sure, I saw Rembrandt’s Night Watch and Vemeer’s Milkmaid, for their exquisite lighting and rural charm, respectively. There were other paintings too but they didn’t find a way into my heart. Outside the galleries and museums, the city was a tourist trap and inside where the pictures beckoned, I had no meaningful emotions to offer.
On the day before I flew back to Canada, I went to the Van Gogh Museum. Seeing Vincent seemed a bit unsophisticated, because he’s the go-to person in the cannon, like a Beatles or Kerouac of the visual arts. The world’s most famous Dutch painter never did it for me either.
I’d been putting off a visit but it was my last day in the city and I had no intention of returning. There was a compulsion to get stoned and ride the trams, walk for a while and maybe get on a bicycle, and there was also a stronger feeling that I should go to the Van Gogh Museum. So, I ended up at Museumplein 6, 1071 DJ, Amsterdam, lining up with all the other philistines. I even yawned at the cashier who gave me my ticket in an attempt to demonstrate my reluctance, more to myself than anyone else, before entering the building.
I visited the sunflowers, the fields with the black birds, and the warped night sky in Arles. They were all impressive. Thick globules of bright paint carved in either direction, textures overlapped and bled into one another and the colours moved. These images transcended my memory of them in books. Soon, I renounced my prejudices. Painting after painting depicted frustration, anger and anxiety. The bold brush or palette slashed at the canvases to build a vision, but also disclosed the storm within. The violence of reality, Vincent Van Gogh’s reality was evident.
Soon I was seeing and feeling the world through Vincent’s eyes. I understood. The intensity of my own experiences, outside the galleries and museums, created similar violent realities. Vincent showed me my feelings too. We shared a vision.
No one else seemed to be having the same experience. My fellow attendees would trot to their pictures and stand in front of them for a minute and then move over to the next one. Not to look at the paintings but to consume them like mental checkmarks.
For all the turmoil on display, it was the placid depiction of an interior that affected me the most. The Bedroom, probably the most famous bed chamber represented in art, acted like an addendum to all that had been witnessed before. I could perceive the same undercurrents, the feeling of everything tipping into chaos. The possessed bedroom furniture and the skewed walls revealed the intrinsic unsteadiness to the world, but this was a peaceful place, a room meant for sleeping. The Bedroom says reality is unreliable and on the point of collapse, in every waking moment, but peace is also available if you want it. And Vincent said, despite the struggle there can be a space for me where I can rest.
The Bedroom was the last painting witnessed; nothing could follow its denouncement. I tried to purchase a reproduction in the gift shop but the secondary images were expensive facsimiles with none of the power of the original. I left the Van Gogh Museum, and not long afterwards I also left Amsterdam.
Maybe six-months later, in Toronto, just after Christmas when the new year is still deciding what it should be, I found myself in a Salvation Army Thrift Store. I have a talent for finding gems in the detritus of former lives and you’ll often find me searching through coat hangers and pages in the tombs of the used and the second-hand. On one of the shelves that day I found a version of Van Gogh’s The Bedroom. It was the same size as the one in Amsterdam but discoloured to a shade of blue, thanks to the unforgiving rays of the sun. The picture looked perfect, even with the marks of its decay, so I bought it.
At home, in my small bedroom, I hung the painting above my bed. Van Gogh’s bedroom was now in my bedroom like a portal to a refracted world, not too dissimilar to my own. At night, with this new talisman over my head, I could sleep, deeply and at peace. In the morning, I could look over at the sun-bleached image and turn to face the world. Vincent’s gift, imbued in the painting, from over a century ago, lived on in my apartment.
After many nights of Vincent Van Gogh assisted sleep the painting decided to move. It was morning and the light had crept into the room illuminating small pockets of space. I could feel something heavy resting on me. The Bedroom had decided to sit on my body together with its wall hook. While speculating if the picture was hung correctly, I also wondered why the arrival of this object hadn’t awoken me. The canvas was face down, so I reached to check for damage to its painted front, but my fingers paused as my eye caught a small detail in the right-hand corner. The word Vincent, scrawled in the hand of someone not too contradictory to the original artist. Even in my sleepy state I knew that this couldn’t be an authentic Van Gogh painting, for despite the omittence of his surname, which Vincent didn’t include due to trouble with pronunciation, I had seen his signature in the paint itself, often in odd places, like the outside wall of a building or on a flowerpot. I also knew there were multiple bedrooms, three paintings, identical almost, in their rendition of the same room in the south of France. There couldn’t be a fourth version. But as I stood on my precarious mattress, vainly attempting to return the painting to the wall, I wondered if there could be.
Christian Martius (2022)
Fluff on the Ceiling Fan
She had fluff on her ceiling fan. It just sat there on the top of one of the blades, taunting me with all its grey curly dirtiness. I used to stare at it when I lay on her mattress in the morning, often when she was up already and I was in the bed alone. Sometimes when she was there with me, in the bed, we would joke about that single piece of fluff, sitting on the edge of the blade, poised to topple over into our world, but never doing so. I'd say to her that I was going to clean that ceiling fan and finally get rid of that dastardly piece of fluff so it didn't torment us anymore. She said that she hadn't noticed it before, at least not until I mentioned it. I think I actually did clean that fan and remove the fluff but I don't quite remember doing it, because actions like these are easily forgotten and the desire to do it was always stronger than the memory of doing so. In any case that piece of fluff came back. It was another piece; of course; maybe taken from the huge mound of grey curly dirty fluff that all the separate pieces come from in this world, or it could have been the same piece that decided to sit in exactly the same spot, precariously like before, to really taunt me. She even told me there was fluff on her ceiling fan again, but I never saw it or had the chance to remove it again.
Christian Martius (2014)
Small Faces
(for Zorianna)
My son is three-years old. Not seventeen. But in my kitchen there is an illustration of a teenager that is supposed to be of my son.
I remember when the artist tried to capture Thomas and watching for the face to emerge from the paper. The initial anomalies or unfamiliarity could have been artistic flourishes, abstractions, which allowed Marge to render her signature. But the eyes in the picture showed more life in them than my little boy has experienced. His curly hair was ignored and replaced with a French crop. Sharper angles formed on his cheeks and his chin stretched down to remove his small round face. This artifice was amplified by its creator pausing, between strokes of her pencil, to study the (soon to be unwilling) subject and then moving her hand accordingly, as if the image was true, but the image looked nothing like my son, nothing at all.
Thomas managed to be inactive enough to be created in two dimensions. My own best drawing was probably scrawled on the back of school exercise book when I was a teenager, maybe some crude version of a lead singer in a band I liked back then. Though, I could probably produce a better facsimile of my boy than the one that was handed to me in the mall, next to the fountain, in Marge’s portraiture alcove. She even said to me, “What do you think?”
I was aghast but not indignant and in the moment I just said, “It’s fine.” I could not find the words to express my feelings. There was shock but also an understanding that no one really sees the world the same way you do, more or less. In the end I just thanked her and took the picture home with me.
Weeks later I found myself in my neighbourhood’s second-hand record store. My husband had Thomas, so I was free to flick through the old vinyl without pleas for food or ideas from my imagination. Most of the records were of the classic rock variety, museum pieces from half a century ago. In this heaving pile of history there was a record by a band called the Small Faces. As is often the case, it’s the covers of books and records that strike me first, and I pulled the picture sleeve out as soon as I saw it. For the first time I ended up buying an album for the cover photograph alone.
Later that evening I showed the album to my husband.
“Look it’s Thomas.” I said, “Well, not our Thomas, the one in the picture.”
Mark balanced the cover in one hand like a waiter’s plate. The record played on the turntable behind him. The song was called “All or Nothing.”
“Steve Marriott it says here, he’s the lead singer.”
“It’s uncanny isn’t it?”
Mark stared into the image. Examined the wispy blonde hair, the cheeky street-urchin smile.
“Yes, for sure. Maybe the artist has a thing for the lead singer of the Small Faces?”
“You, think?” I said.
The next day I went looking for Marge. She was in her usual spot in the mall by the fountain. A dark haired boy of about six fidgeted in front of her. From where I was standing I could see the portrait on paper take form. The hippy, mod, 60s rock-star look is familiar to me now. It’s the same image that I have in my apartment, of a boy I’ve never met and who isn’t even alive. Maybe my neighbour has one too, and the people on my street, and in the neighbourhood, all have the same small face on a shelf somewhere, which looks nothing like their children. I often look at my version, hoping to see my own son in that picture. Maybe one day I will.
Christian Martius (2018)
I Follow the Dog
Rush hour. Black and dark blue fabrics. Leather shoes and bags over the shoulder. Faces look forward, never up or down, just straight ahead towards an indefinite object. Behind the buildings there is an unseen horizon. Legs march on the sidewalk, determined and certain, attached to the bodies focussed on getting home. I can see them, the line of people, at the next intersection and I anticipate joining them, picking up their walking rhythm, their steady gait, the ability to negotiate space and the desire to be somewhere else.
But there is a dog. It walks in front of me at the intersection, traverses from right to left, ambles even, in the relaxed manner of an animal that knows what it is doing and knows where it is going but is in no rush to do or go anywhere. Dogs don't come downtown. If you want to see dogs you go to the lake or the city parks or those neighbourhoods that have trees and leaves and children in them. But there it is, a terrier I think, with dirty blonde curly hair, padding along on the sidewalk, unperturbed by the volume of traffic, as if it always walks with such ease at this time and in this place, heading in the same direction as all the people going home.
This dog is alone. Not technically alone because of all the people. There is just no companion nearby. And if you believe that humans own dogs, rather than it being the other way around, there is also no owner to be seen. And the people that walk on the sidewalk with the dog don't even notice that it is there. The suits and the shoes lost in their thoughts don't see the animal at all. And I worry that the cars and buses lost in their thoughts won't notice the dog either, and the dog is walking towards them.
Christian Martius (2016)
Where the Wind Will Take Us
Stare at my father. In my teenage years he chased a boyfriend out of the house. He ran down the road with a rolled up newspaper. Glasses hung around his neck and slippers slapped against the tarmac. It was almost vaudeville. Was it so long ago?
Stare at my father. He inflated my paddling pool in the summer or tickled me when I thought I was being funny. He's shrivelled now and silent. His hands are placed on his lap. His skin is the same colour as the inside of the casket.
I'm a black dress, chipped nail varnish and tears. My brother comes up beside me and says nothing. We don't get on. He looks like my father but today I can forgive him for the way he treats me. Arms are lowered. He has learnt to shut up, at least until this is over.
"Everything happens for a reason," said Gloria the Christian who lives next door. I wanted to take her gardening shears and snip her head off.
"How's that for a reason?"
This was on the day we learnt my father was going to die. He was in recovery. Hope came back into our lives with a flush of health. We believed our father would get better, even when he said, "I'm not going to survive this."
"You don't know that for sure," I'd say to him and really mean it this time. This was after the chemotherapy finished. When the skin stopped being grey. After his stomach was cut open. After tumours were removed and after the first phone call that turned my knuckles white.
My eyes could not look at Gloria. A floral print begged for my attention and the shears were waiting. The clang of a dustbin lid was the only real answer. The chances of survival equalized before they dwindled. Despite the tumour's malignancy or the number of lymph node glands it touched. My father could have come back. Who decided that he shouldn't? So, I leave Gloria in her garden with her God.
My brother stands next to me in the funeral parlour. He doesn't have to say anything. We both know we took him for granted. We let our own lives get in the way. When the illness came we paid attention, but I guess it was too late by then. Father always held onto our balloons despite the helium that pushed them away. We didn't know that one day he would let go and leave them to the wind.
Christian Martius (2005)
Another Green World
For a brief period, between being an infant and a schoolkid, I lived in the countryside. Fields surrounded the house that was home. When standing on a hill all you could see was a single straight road, a solitary brick building and a lot of fields. The sight could have been of one huge field divided by carved-out rectangles of walled vegetation. It certainly seemed that way. You could imagine the whole world was just one big field, from that vantage point, and that singular road traversed the globe in an unwavering direction, like a straight line drawn around an orange.
Life back then was spent in the grass. The green blades did not just sit under your feet to go unnoticed by your shoes. They rose up and grew taller than the bodies upon them. They changed colour and sometimes they danced for you. We spent a lot of time in the grass because it was what surrounded us the most. Even when we were in our beds at night, and bound within solid walls of our own making, the grass hemmed us in and stretched out for as far you could see.
My earliest memory is of that grass. I remember feeling lost and alone in a field and the blades enveloping my tiny body, blocking out the sun and trapping me in a green tendril embrace that mocked the blue behind it. That grass made me feel even more lost and alone than I already was, but it was never malevolent, it just seemed to indifferently reflect my status.
Sometime later, years in fact, a friend told me, while we looked on at children on a trimmed city park lawn, that feelings that manifest in your earliest memory organize and determine your emotional landscape for the rest of your life. It was one of those statements that felt both true and untrue. It felt true because I've never not felt lost and alone. It also felt untrue because I've since seen my childhood memory again. My communion with the grass appeared in a scene in a movie. It played out on celluloid exactly how I remember it. The film even had the same camera angles and coordination of colours. This makes me believe that the memory is not mine. Although, I am sure the grass still grows tall, changes colour and dances indifferently in a world of fields, even though I am no longer in it.
Christian Martius (2015)
Louis Armstrong on the Moon
Sometimes a date is a man telling a woman that Louis Armstrong landed on the moon. You sit there and listen to this garbage but your mind is already elsewhere, thinking of other mundane subjects beyond the mundane subject of the conversation. But this isn't a conversation. He just talks at you. He pays no attention to your words and hopes, somehow, that you will be impressed by him.
But then you think, as his voice drones on, that seeing Louis Armstrong on the moon would be brilliant and this person has actually, inadvertently, conjured up an event that you could only hope to experience. A Jazz band could shuffle into place on the dull ash-like dirt of the moon and on a podium could stand Louis Armstrong smiling like he does, famously, with those eyes and mouth. Planet Earth would hang in the dark space behind him, just over his right shoulder, like a distant forgotten bauble. As the tiny white holes in the black twinkle, a shooting star traces over the lunar horizon and the band begins with the sound of a familiar trombone. What a Wonderful World is sung, and love emanates from a dead, gray rock, with a jazz band, towards the only nearby place with life.
And then you are back on Planet Earth. Your gin and tonic looks flat and the man in front of you is now telling you Stanley Kubrick directed Close Encounters of the Third Kind. And you think to yourself, what a wonderful world.
Christian Martius (2015)
Time
“Do you ever feel like you are running out of time?” That was one of the first questions she asked. She also accentuated the word feel in the sentence, as if it had more than a couple of vowels in it, which made the corners of her mouth stretch back towards her ears and her eyes squint a little.
It sounded like feeeeeeeeeeeeeeeel.
I knew at that point I could no longer accept the reality I had been given, when I thought I had, but clearly had not.