All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

by Seán Hewitt

History seeping from one man into the warm body of another, then being carried off into the daily life of the world, barely noticed. * It was at school, aged seventeen, that I first became aware of my blood as somehow historical, extending back before I was born.

When they said, ‘I’m just scared that you’ll be unhappy,’ what I really felt they were saying was ‘I am scared that if you continue being yourself, we will make you unhappy.’

As best as I could, I tried to shine the world for him, as though I could convince him out of whatever strange logic had taken hold. I would spend hours putting my case together, collecting evidence in my mind. Lists of things that were wonderful: evenings in the park with friends; snow on a bright day; swimming in the lake in summertime; even just sitting here together. Wasn’t that something? It was more than I had ever thought was possible.

It is hard to account for the trauma of a thing that didn’t happen, hard to accommodate a fear based in an almost-event, a thing that might have occurred, but didn’t. The truth, though, is that Elias found himself so close to the edge of life, came so near to the brink of it, that he changed us both forever. Still, years later, it is the music of what almost happened that haunts me most, and will not leave my mind.

How could I ever see past the mirrored surface that reflected everything back at me with my own image imposed across it? But maybe that mirror was what I needed. There was something he was showing me, a line where empathising with another meant empathising with myself, too. Hopkins wrote that ‘What you look hard at seems to look hard at you.’ And so here we were, looking hard at each other, and I was puzzling him for clues.

There was happiness, yes, but there was always the relentless knowledge of time running out. Love, comfort, safety, all of them ran like sand through an hourglass.

If anything was contrary to nature it was harnessing an idea of nature and weaponising it.

If he said that the only way out was to kill himself, could I listen without saying no? If he began to spiral downwards, should I sit beside him or try to lift him up? It was unbearable to listen, unbearable to be passive when he was slipping away, unbearable to watch him drowning and not hold out my hand, not to take his, not try with all my strength to haul him back to the light.

Maybe part of the problem, looking back, was here, in the things we lost between each other, in our failed sentences, in the things we lost the courage to say. In easier times, there was less at stake. What did it matter if a few things were lost, when we had so much in store? But soon the space between us became dark and impassable, and in the aftermath we had lost so much of ourselves that we hadn’t the energy to try it all again.

And in calling up those echoes from another time, in sounding the darkness behind the words for whatever might be found there, it was as though we called something else up, too, a ghost to live between us, someone to carry those fragile, shimmering parts of ourselves across to each other. Karin, carrying messages like crystal bowls from one of us to the other.

I arrested everything into an endless, enduring present: the idea that time would progress, would alter, seemed impossible. If I acknowledged the possibility of a future, I acknowledged the possibility of Elias’s death – of his leaving, of my own death, or of my own life without him – and so I shut out time altogether. I didn’t dare to ask for the future. I could not tell what the past would be made of next.

By some instinct, when the world had blocked my path, I went out and made a new one; and it happened that the one I made was already there, already marked out by others, only it was invisible to me, as though all those men were speaking through me, moving me, haunting me, guiding me on. Perhaps that is why I feel so close to them, a sort of familial closeness – where they went I followed, and the further I went, the more I felt them watching over me. As I moved forward, I also moved back, looping history inside myself, listening to them, communing with them. When I could not speak to anyone, I spoke with them.

I had taken inside myself all of the things I had heard and seen, all of the ways I had been treated. How could I not have dealt them back? How could I not have enacted in my life the things that had been acted on to me? How many of my own hurts had I embodied and played out again in my life, passing the same things on to others?

For a paraclete is ‘one who encourages, stirs up, urges forward, who calls us on’ – ‘What the spur and command is to a horse, a Paraclete is to the soul.’

He was being born again into the earth, in a new form, and it wouldn’t be long until all of his atoms were dispersed across the village, then the country, and then the world, carried off inside birds, growing into plants, and into butterflies. What was the garden, then, if not heaven, if not a place made up of everything that had been lost to us, if not an afterlife? After that, the whole world could be heaven to me. Still, it seems like the most simple, the most beautiful way I can think of looking at life. Everything, all of it, is mimicry.

Everything carries within itself the remnant forms of older selves, older structures we have evolved through, vestiges of the history of our species. Every day, the present and the past coexist in the body. I think we carry those other histories, too, even before we know them. We speak with those ghosts all the time, even before we recognise who they are or what they are telling us.

I thought of the boy in the photograph, that stranger the world had parted me from. What would I have been like if I had formed myself, if I had never had to integrate, if he was still here, one and the same with me? But no, there is no ‘formed’, only forming; ongoing, unfolding. I looked down at the photograph and saw the boy looking back at me. Little self-maker. Could I call him back, could I ask him to come home?