By Michael Collins
The Impostor and Blue Butterflies of the Amazon complete a book in the form of two novellas. Though each features a character recovering from a stroke, their structures are quite different, reflecting not only the two characters’ different processes of recovery, but also the way the stroke events are experienced and incorporated by the affected characters and their families due to their preceding psychological and social structures. The two novellas’ distinct approaches and idiosyncrasies contextualize and support one another in exploring the mysteries and possibilities of life continually unfolding rather than irrevocably damaged.
The narrator of The Impostor is a translator, trained to thinking about gaps and bridges in language. Perhaps a result, he approaches his new set of psychic experiences by considering the gaps between language and image, between present experience and present experience of the past, between himself and the others who have mental compartments that make such reflections less urgent. His background also seems to offer him a sense of hope through the context of historical views: “During the Renaissance…certain powers were attributed to the insane” such as the “ability to reveal secret truths. Or lost ones” (77). This perspective fosters resilience, born of a paradoxical sense of community to which his struggles are comprehensible, comprehended as if by others: “It’s an age-old, well-known challenge: trying to transcend the limits created by familiarity when confronting new realities. Similar to playing with mirages’ (89). These immanently helpful aspects of his pre-stroke life present a subtle way of considering it, in part, as a source of strength and orientation in coping with his stroke, as opposed to an irrevocable loss.
A flexible existentialist grounding also seems to facilitate his transitions:
“I sense my nothing is changing. Not that I remember what happened, but I’m coming to terms with having lived for awhile in a void, the nature of which I have no way of appraising. My nothing has become acceptable, gained consistency, even taken on a distinctness. It belongs to me. One more intangible possession in my collection” (28).
He approaches his “void” through various means, including difficult work with a psychologist:
“Not even the doctor, a grown man, has any idea what I’m talking about. Or of the affective burden that certain memories carry. The distances that separate us are insurmountable.
Not to speak of the different realities that surround me and, in my case, are more like sealed compartments. It’s as if I’m in an art gallery, confined to moving within the paintings exhibited side by side” (67).
Attention to unsettling dreams provides one frustratingly hopeful method: “My dreams, just like my visions, are no more than fragments of stories that, taken together, elude me” (56), he tells his therapist. This bridging between conscious and sleeping manifestations corresponds with his general sense of unreality in not being able to place memories into chronology. More disturbing, however, are the dreams’ destabilizing of identity from which the title is drawn:
“But what stuck with me, lodged deep, was the certainty that the man was no more than a stranger. Except that, for him, I was exactly who I had purported to be upon shaking his hand: his best friend.
Which of the two of us was the impostor?” (31; italics original).
The narrator’s willingness to tolerate paradoxical realities allows him to explore this confusion in his extended meditation: “[I]n my world there’s no space for before or after. As many realities as there might be, they all play out in the present” (84; italics original). In being released from their “normal” psychological compartments, his dreams, visions, and memories each are allowed their own fullness of psychological reality, in ways that imply the instability of our own daily assumptions about identity.
These “powers” of the “insane” are tethered to human community by the relationships they complicate, as in the following therapy session:
“I slowly resume. ‘My visions are quite clear. Vivid, like films. In focus and in the foreground. Except that nothing in them is re-created. They’re real…’
New pause. And then ‘…as real as you, sitting over there in your chair. Or me, sitting here in mine.’
‘I see.’” (61)
The gaps between different psychological experiences are mirrored, to some extent, in the palpable difference between the narrator’s recounting of them and the doctor’s standardized response. In this conversational lull, we may empathize with the recurrent loneliness of the narrator’s journey: “The gap between us lies in wait, as if it were a living thing and needed to nourish itself on something that goes beyond what’s being said. They’re carnivores, my gaps” (61). Notably, the fears around absence of response provide an experiential bridge to a sensation the reader may have experienced: “The tone of my voice surprises me. It echoes more than it sounds. And comes from far away. A distance similar to the one separating me from the room I find myself in” (61).
The hopeful pun in “the room I find myself in” is perhaps buoyed by the sequence of rooms shared with loved ones who people his days, though these relationships also show textual evocations of his partial isolation as here with his partner, Marisa:
“And she, who had sensed something about the nature of my silences, and had always known to pause when she saw me walled between two worlds, whispers with her usual tenderness, ‘And you my love…’
I face her. Marisa, my soul mate … The only human being who might be able to bring to the forefront of my story a secret truth…” (64; italics original).
The passage continues, imagining a trip they hope will help with his condition. Yet, again, the description sounds like an age-old lovers’ wish, expressed as it can only be, in momentary rediscovery:
“A landscape we can call our own… Her words stun more than surprise me. Could the two of us now be passengers on the same journey?
One thing is certain: Marisa would have had to overcome an extraordinary barrier to get where I am. And that certainty hits me with the force of a revelation.
Could this be love?” (64; italics original).
The narrator’s relationships, alongside his own determination to continue exploring life, provide readers new ways of seeing our own “normal” experiences through his perspective, profound despite – and sometimes because of – its wounds. His comments on translation apply here equally to living by transforming the “text” one is given: “As a translator, moreover, I have a weakness for those who take ownership of a masterpiece and improve on it. A boldness – never an affront – that can go down as an act of defiance but often represents a remarkable accomplishment” (54).
Whereas in The Impostor, the stroke was experienced and explored by one introspective narrator, Blue Butterflies of the Amazon, in which the four main characters rotate as narrator, incorporates somewhat analogous traumas that appear to be synchronistic from several characters’ perspectives. Both aspects present different ways of placing the stroke within a broader context. Each section reads both as an awakening from the preceding and a return to an evolving sensibility. Foregrounding these inner worlds’ connections with interpersonal and sometimes transpersonal dynamics opens different perspectives into the generation of new life chapters, movements in consciousness that present a pluralistic correspondence to those in the opening novella.
Elizabeth, who is recovering from the stroke, remarks, “Stories like ours never end; they remain suspended, in search of invisible support” (185). However, along the path to this view of a potentially supportive universe, her relative social isolation causes her to imagine alternating sides of a bipolar power dynamic as her own identity:
“Whatever the destiny of this unique family, it will always be governed by the pendulum swing of our thirsts – which, apparently, I inspired from the depths of my litter. Wheelchairs may roll down pyramids, or between the playing cards from old decks in colored dreams. A priestess of the invisible – that’s what I was born to be. Let them stare, those who doubt me! The reality that surrounds me is nothing more than a small part of what is yet to come.
Lost in a fog? Me? (125)
Deborah, her daughter-in-law, experiences a different form of identity disruption:
“We’re rolling down a hill, out of control. Impossible to stop; it would be beyond our strength – mine, most certainly. Everything else has faded into the background, from the tenderness I feel for Daniel to my sorrow for the troubles of the world. Everything feeds my suffering; everything sustains my pleasure. Ours is an evil spell powerful enough to steamroll hesitations and doubts.” (102)
Daniel, Elizabeth’s son, expresses a non-dual view of the near airplane crash he experienced with his wife and father:
“I was divested of the condition of individuality. When I extended my hand to my father, I blended into him – and he into me. We became one with the passengers around us, with the plane’s molecules, the clouds outside, the universe and everything in it, including unimagined riches. My ‘self’ washed away like water rolling off my body….” (128).
Daniel’s vision is complicated, to some degree, by the experiences of those who slowly enact it in the processes of healing they undergo and undertake. Deborah, in particular, sees a change in consciousness as essential:
“Every day, my desire to rethink the most recent chapters of my life grows. To deny what happened doesn’t even occur to me. On the contrary, the intensity with which things unraveled seems crucial to me. To go on, I need the residue of this delirium. Running away from these memories would be like disrespecting a trophy earned in mortal combat” (164; italics original).
Her journey, in fact, seems to inform how we should approach the book itself: “Beauty, in the end, needs to be shaped by time. What would happen to our desires if they couldn’t benefit from occasional pauses or breaks” (165). In the space between the two sentences, the idea of beauty’s cultivation in the absence of desire opens to Deborah’s invitation to her inner reader to respond in her silence, as if enacting her self-sufficient pursuit of a newly discovered kind of beauty. In the process, perhaps we, as the literal readers, are invited into similar inner dialogues of deepening of self-exploration.
Other transformations also take place through new awareness of what was previously thought of as empty space. Thomas remarks on Elizabeth’s work with Sylvia the clairvoyant: “I’ve given up trying to understand exactly what goes on between these two. They seem to converse. But what they say to each other in these long silences – the stories they tell, or the detail with which they discuss experiences distant or immanent – is simply impossible to guess” (166). Interestingly, Elizabeth tells us little about these interactions herself, perhaps because her observations of the tangle of stories in which she was unwillingly enmeshed leads her even further inward:
“The story of Deborah and Thomas, Daniel’s, mine … Together or separate, in that order or any other. Twined together by facts that were not revealed and never will be. Lived with equal intensity, if not greater. And which, had they surfaced, would have changed the color, shape, and meaning of our saga.
What interests me most, now, is to focus on myself, and pay homage to this more personal miracle of mine. I was, no doubt, the surprising recipient of a celestial act of kindness. Such a distinction, however, demands I reposition my thoughts. I must advance. Just to play at life is no longer an option” (169-70).
By contrast, Deborah concludes by writing to renew a relationship with her estranged brother: “I made so many pauses as I wrote, I left so many spaces for other stories.…As if wishing that, through those spaces, he could trace a path to our part of the world, by a new route – but this time one familiar to him” (182). Her words could describe the novella and letter equally. Whereas the more familiar use of omission is to cast shadows where readers are forced to speculate at what characters’ manipulations and blind spots may be hiding from us, these narrators’ self-reflective uses of “gaps” and “spaces,” in tandem with the largely constructive treatments of traumatic events, seem intended to leave space for all of the characters’ ongoing discoveries in their willingness to live into strange new versions of themselves – and, by extension, the readers’ as well.
You can find the book here: https://blpress.org/books/the-impostor/
Michael Collins’ poems and book reviews have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in more than 70 journals and magazines. He is also the author of the chapbooks How to Sing when People Cut off your Head and Leave it Floating in the Water and Harbor Mandala and the full-length collections Psalmandala and Appearances, which was named one of the best indie poetry collections of 2017 by Kirkus Reviews. He teaches creative and expository writing at New York University and is the Poet Laureate of Mamaroneck, NY. Visit notthatmichaelcollins.com.
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North of Oxford 