The Language of Bees - Laurie R. King [19]
I'd thought it an oddity, but now it was a revelation: At nineteen, a year after his mother's death, Damian had definitely known who his father was. He had known of Holmes' beekeeping avocation in his so-called retirement. He had painted this as a portrait of the famous man who had, to his mind, coldly abandoned mother and child. He had painted it with the consummate skill of a man, impelled by the fury of a scorned adolescent.
The Father (1): The boy knew no earthly father. He was
raised by the feminine, moon-lit side of his race. All men
were his father, all women his mother.
Testimony, I:3
SO,” SAID HOLMES. “SHANGHAI.”
“Yes.” Damian took a breath, either summoning his thoughts, or rousing his determination. “As I said, you might think the city was the very worst place for a man vulnerable to temptation, but after my long sobriety aboard the Bella Acqua, it was as if my body came to value its natural state, and my mind found the tight-rope act of daily life in Shanghai exhilarating. It was a challenge simply to walk down the street for a newspaper, passing two gin-joints, an opium den, and the Sikh who sold bhang from a tray.
“And there was another reason Shanghai felt right. Do you know André Breton?”
“I have heard of him,” Holmes replied. “The self-appointed spokesman for the movement known as Surrealism.”
“Now, yes. During the War, André worked at the hospital in Nantes, where he came to adapt certain psychological theories of Sigmund Freud to treat victims of shell-shock. That was where I met him, after I… after I was injured.
“André's idea was that if one could break through the madness of shell-shock and regain access to the unconscious mind, the conscious and the unconscious might, as it were, join forces, and wholeness would be regained. He used what he calls automatism, a pure up-welling of dream-thought and dream-images, without the guidance of rational or even aesthetic concern, in various forms of art: writing, painting, sculpting, drama.
“Before long, it became clear that automatism was not merely a source of healing damaged minds, but a philosophy of life, a means of bringing together the separate realities of the human experience. Anyone who has spent time on the Front knows that, when one lifts his head from a barrage and finds dead people all around, there is a moment when life is immeasurably sweet and intensely real. In a similar way, the shock of the unexpected in a piece of art can forge a momentary link between light and dark, rationality and madness, matter-of-factness and absurdity, beauty and obscenity.
“As you see in that painting, I'd already been feeling my way in that direction before the War—the Dada movement, although Dadaism was intellectual and political compared to what André had in mind.
“Shanghai—and particularly, being a foreigner in Shanghai—might have been purposefully designed by André to illustrate and encourage the ‘surrealist’ impulse. Every moment there possesses an air of peculiarity, every corner brings a new gem of crystal-clear absurdity. My landlord, it turned out, was a policeman with a side business of child prostitutes. One of his girls used to sit in the courtyard playing the guitar and telling me of her dream to become a Catholic nun, once she had finished putting her older brother through university. The head of the missionary school where I taught for a while spent his every lunch-hour with an opium pipe. One discovered purity in the gutters and filth in the glittering shop-windows, every hour of every day.
“I found Shanghai to be the very essence of Surrealist doctrine: If the world is mad, then the maddest man is the most sane.
“So: I became sane by embracing madness. I became intoxicated by sobriety. I moved