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A Letter from the Alps

8 October 2009 2 Comments

Copyright: Wellcome Collection

Fredric Skargren

Dear Mnumba,

It seems as if I am writing you a letter, my dear friend. We have always been honest to each other. Thus, to make sure that there is no misunderstanding between the two of us, perhaps I should confess immediately that this is the case. I am writing you a letter! I am writing to you from a wooden cottage on the border between Italy and Switzerland, just by Lake Como and Lake Maggiore. The first draft of this letter was made in handwriting just by the previously mentioned lake, whereas the text you are reading now was compiled on a computer, on the stony surface of my desk. At this moment it is snowing outside. The snowflakes are as big as the stars and the sky is white. Do not worry dear Mnumba; the cottage is warm which the snowflakes would confirm if they could live to tell.

Before we venture further into details, let me briefly provide you with some general remarks concerning my habitus. In terms of time, I have a long way to go before I have gathered sufficient specimens to analyse back at the laboratory. My funding will unfortunately only allow me to stay here for two more months and there is little leeway for buying any more office equipment or specimen gathering paraphernalia. In addition, I am afraid that my cottage basement is not big enough to harbour the amount of specimens required by the research board. I will have to start storing the samples on the wooden floor in my living space which currently looks as follows: one big room, with a bunk-bed, a desk made of rocks from the local mountain and a shelf made of trees from the rainforest. There are two windows in my room, and they are facing each other on opposite sides, and there is a door which allows one to enter and exit the cottage.

O Mnumba, the days feel protracted; and I am often restless – but I am certainly not lonely! I feel comfortable in knowing that the specimens are well preserved in the basement. I have only to wander outside for a while in the snow, at the foot of the mountains – in order to relinquish my feelings of restlessness and replenish my desires to be lonely. Because, my dear Mnumba, I am not alone in the cottage. I have arranged with the people residing in the near by village to visit me once a week for a transaction of basic foodstuffs, whiskey, animal protein and moleskins. They send me a different person each time. Sometimes they send a male sometimes a female, sometimes a teenager, other times it is an elderly person, less frequently they are polite, more often than seldom they speak and they always come alone.

Mnumba, I must tell you about the odd quotations I found lying around in one of the stone drawers of my stone desk. They all seem to be written at various points in history, and differ quite considerably in terms of content. On evenings like this, I amuse myself by reading a few of them while blazing my throat with the Lagavulin you bought me – delivered by an elderly villager who happened to speak, but not in a polite manner. The first quote claims to be dated from the 1960s and says:

“Speak bluntly and you will trust, speak dada and the next word will try to run with you“.

There is another quote which I found just yesterday while looking for my specimen requirements instructions, it says:

“The person who thinks of the next day during dinner will be eating with her eyes” and claims to be written by an unknown Beylerbeylik of early modern Ottoman period in the year 1406.

Let me give you but a few more Mnumba. I believe you will find them of the utmost interest, especially since I found them lying in a drawer made of stone in a cottage in the Alps.

“Eat long enough and you will try; eat more and they will try“

“In order to predict you must foresee and in order to not be predicted you mustn’t“

“The umbrella is a tool for thought, says the weak, the umbrella is the fools reflection of herself, says the Greek, the umbrella is the crust of thought, says the Word that rhymes with eek“

“In the times of old, they said not to themselves that their times were old, but only reflected upon how the time dating before them was enough to make them think of it as aged“

“They who sit with their face are not strangers to their feet”

I must make a second confession Mnumba. As you know I was hoping to get away from my continuous contemplating that seems to plague my mind, by moving to the Alps. Now, this “contemplation” seems to be of a peculiar kind in that it reverberates, or echoes, if you will, throughout my consciousness. I seem to have entered a dilemma where the contemplation, eo ipso, have become a means towards its own end. In turn, this contemplation has nothing to do, prima facie, with my geographical location (even though the mountains have a peculiar way of making my sensory systems grapple with a surrounding that may alleviate the contemplation). At present I know this much: the peculiarity of the contemplation lay in how it repeats itself in the same manner of sequence, every morning: contemplating my worries, worrying about my contemplation. So far every morning begins with intense contemplation. Which is odd, in fact, as you probably noticed Mnumba, because contemplation is a state of being, you cannot have an intense feeling of contemplation. Yet this is what is happening to me!

Mnumba, my dear Mnumba, I sleep in a bunk bed. Perhaps I should explain that the bunk bed is the place of which one might sleep? It being a bunk bed, I am thus close to the ceiling of the room in which I have been sleeping for the last three months. Now, if the contemplation on the one hand is of a continuous echoing inside my being, it is also a part of my physical activities. Let me give you but one example: The contemplation continues as I move my body around my bottom – swinging my body around its own axel, with my bottom as a greasy bearing – using the bed sheets as a platform for spinning. The swinging or spinning rather – of my body around its own axel – continues for a moment as I aim my legs for the ladder – enabling me eventually to climb down from the bunk-bed.

Mnumba, there is no one else but me in the room, I can assure you, when I conduct this, shall we call it: morning exercise. That is, at this moment, except for me and the occasional others, there is only me in the room and a silver pillow lying on the cedar coloured wooden floor.

The others that are occasionally here in the room are the focus of my contemplation. Yes! I believe it must be so Mnumba. It is they, Mnumba! They, the others of which I spoke about before being occasionally – meaning not frequently – visitors to my room, are the original source of my contemplation.

The morning exercises end with me sitting with my legs dangling down the ladder of my bunk bed, contemplating about the others; talking about the others and talking to the others, at the same time. I tell the others (imagining them, the others, sitting on the silver coloured pillow with their long yellow hair on the cedar painted floor) about my contemplations. I tell them, how I woke up at 08:02, last Monday – the 1st of November. I tell them how I had two slices of baguettes for breakfast, that I ate some Izmir cheese and drank two cups of filter coffee with no milk or sugar. I tell them this Mnumba, while contemplating and watching how they smirk at my contemplation.

However, as I continue telling the others that at 10:32, later that day I went close to Lake Maggiore, in search for more specimens, my contemplation seems to be taking a peculiar form. It so happens, my dear Mnumba, that I saw this man with a black coat and thick black glasses standing with his back to the lake, he was waving at me. He stood close to a car with no roof. It was an old car; from the fifties I believe, it was red and shiny. I took large but slow paces towards him; chuckling to myself about the oddness of the situation while I could smell my body odour from five days of not showering. As I approach him, the oddest thing happened, I must explain to you in detail Mnumba.

As I started coming close to the man by the car, he did not react to my presence, yet he continued to wave at me. It felt odd that he did not greet me in any manner what–so-ever. This fostered my desire to walk closer up to him. As I stood in just a few inches from his face, he stopped waving. The man with glasses took a deep breath and I waited patiently, trying to anticipate the phonetics of his words. (I believe, in retrospect, that the man was a pro tempore of my contemplation.)

Nothing came out of his mouth and instead his forehead opened and his brain, stained with black spots, started talking to me with a low-pitched voice in Russian. Surprised by the unexpected development of the situation, I took two steps back in awe and fright and I suddenly found myself stuck – no melted – into a tree. I don’t know how I got free from the tree, but I am here now, writing you a letter, and I feel fine.

Why a melted tree the others ask me, and so might even you ask me my dear Mnumba. To which I reply: You just touched upon the most rational and easiest part of the event, upon which I much explain. This, my dear Mnumba, I answer you, and which, by the way, was also my answer to the others.

You see, as I came up to him, (him meaning the-man-standing-with-black-thick-glasses-leaning-against-a-red-and-shiny-car-that-looked-as-if-it-was-from-the-fifties-whose-brain-had-small-dark-spots-sprinkled-all-around-it-while-at-the-same-time-speaking-to-me-in-Russian), there seemed to be, at the exact same moment, something peculiar going on with his thick black glasses.

He was sweating, not because it was cold outside, but because his thick black glasses had been set in motion, and sweat was pouring down his forehead. His glasses seemed to be locked into his skull bone with two solid nuts made of what looked like steel.

In his right hand, he had a copy of a Russian newspaper Pravda, which he held in front of him, in the height of his motionless chest. Finally, I thought to myself, Pravda, the truth is about to be revealed. Then, my dear Mnumba, as I attempted to read the headlines, his sweaty skull opened. It sounded to me like small thuds of “click, click, click, click, click” as the steel bolts locked into his forehead started revolving around themselves. The temples of his spectacles where supporting the upper half of the skull which was positioned above this yellow mass of goo we call the brain. His glasses made the upper part of his fleshy and bloody skull stay up, you know, so it wouldn’t close again. And the brain explained to me, in Russian, what it said in the newspaper Pravda.

Mnumba, I just remember something, and I must make another correction to what happened to me. The brain didn’t have any black spots on it, I was wrong; the brain was bathing in red and yellow napkins. The napkins had pieces of lumps of fat on it that made greasy impressions on the napkins; just like the stains you get from wiping your hands after you have eaten freshly grilled chicken.

The man with the glasses, whose brain was talking, his face was smiling at me, and his eyes were staring like crazy at me. At this exact instant, I took two steps backwards, and it was so cold, and I had begun to worry, not because of the cold weather, or the perplexity of the situation, but because I had a very warm jacket. But I did not say this to the others; I told them that I was sweating because of the situation.

The tree must have started to melt the exact moment you touched its bark, the others speculated. I don’t know, I replied to the others, but Mnumba, I tell you, the brain was screaming, in Russian. (As you see Mnumba, I never fully answered the question posed by the others.) And as I moved backwards I suddenly felt frozen. Melted into a tree, Mnumba! But I am fine now. I will go out and collect some more specimens.

Take care!

Yours Sincerely,
Dr. Frenk

Ps. another quote I found inscribed in the bottom of one of the drawers of my desk: “The leftovers of the sea will have its revenge on our thirst by being too salty to drink and too little to hope for”