Breakfast B Reading Club
Amsterdam, Brussels
Tom Hallet is a visual artist based in Brussels. His work mainly consists out of drawing
and sculpture. For Breakfast B Reading Series, Tom will bring together two objects
from his archive: a text written a few years after the death of his prolific
grandmother, Didi, a hot-tempered flowerbud, a rose, a mess, a mother. Reading
extracts from his text “Analects (An archived memory for my Father)”, he describes
his grandmother’s body on her deathbed, in the first stages of decomposition,
through his father’s eyes.
… and a cart board box, used to store electricity cables, in which Tom has stored the
last photographs taken by the same mother, Didi. After her stroke she could only
move slowly, lost all her language, learning how to communicate again. This she
used to do through her analog camera. She took place in a chair in her garden, and
took pictures of changing skies, growing plants, leaving traces of herself in them, like
a ghost.
Juxta-positioning these two documents, Tom tries to make sense of the enigmatic
dynamics between mother and son.
Analects
(An archived memory for my father)
1. Sleep
My father told me :I tell you,
This is how it happened:
I opened the gaping wound that was my mouth and witnessed
a gathering. A MotherMurder.
“They are trying to kill my mother.” I tell you this is how it happened.
She… her! Yes she,
Existing in a betwixt state.
An unraveling, let’s say. Let me tell you everything like it really happened, at this juncture, I’ll
say.
An accident
In a garden, No no, it was in a garden, yes, in a pond build central, as a stage, wait
I’ll probably atomise the story into microscopic droplets, I probably will.
I covet in my mother’s nightmares
In her darkened waters
A channeling of genetic pools,
let’s say it was an osmosis,
the absorption of rainwater into a hill,
Before it grows tall
The culmination of clay and oil
And hair resulting in six mountaintops.
Let’s say, tell me.
Through the sheen, a rose garden in glistering webs of morningsilk.
A croaking pond. A heavy scent of dusk.
A brood, A family just out of nowhere, a sudden blast
A conclave of hybrids looking down in the mirroring sky.
I’m shuffling through the images of our collective brain. She is my mother, and she is my
lover, she made a few children, let’s say four, with a man that didn’t want to be one, no,
understand, his demise had everything to do with us, with us being a family. His absence,
what it instituted was so large, was so dark, so frightening, was everything a household could
become, and thus became…
But there was a real sense of love, she placed seeds in the crevices of our ears and eyes in
the hope wildflowers would grow in abundance, that is what love looked like to her, a
garden, sprouted from the faces of her children.
Four grimaces, ad lib initiating an upheaval, a chain. A holding of hands, an adhesion of
surfaces. An amalgamation of bodies. A chain of braided fingers. The sound of rattling
The sound of clattering, OF coaxed circumstances. She knew it would happen though, She
SUGGESTED it to me when I came into her hospital room. “An offering, “ she shrieks, Her, a
shapeshifter in a state of exchange with the world.
“I give you this, and I’ll be another.”
2. Half-awake
My father tells you:
When I awakened in the hospital room where we brought her after her stroke, all I could feel
was parental love. So much love that came oozing out her nearing deadness. She was like
that. An intrepid matriarch. It was always about love. Even if it would make us blind. Maybe
that was the point.
I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at her knees for. My gaze is fixed on the delicate but
sharp relief beneath the white silken hospital blanket. Her stiffening flesh imitates earth’s
crust. Two tectonic plates collide, supporting each other in their mutual conquest to rise,
high, higher, “more morphine please”.
Under the reflecting surface of the bedspread I catch fractions of lightning; static produced
when the electric friction and her farts envelop. I start counting, as anyone should when
awaiting a thunder stroke.
“Why?”
One…
At some point a dying body starts to release all the remaining air that it collected over the
years, in moments of extreme anxiety. Millions of quick little gasps, creating lumps of angry
and marauding organic matter, compressed and stored in the narrow folds of its intestines.
She died of it in the end, today.
She died of compressed, angry, unsaturated farts.
Her toenails grew longer too. A dead body is not entirely dead… yet! It will be at some
point. I really hope so. For her.
Her corpse will grow for several more days before shrinking into a tiny tiny knob. Nails
continue growing. Yellowing follicles creep up alongside translucent hair, buttered up by
decomposition.
Crevices are inevitable, releasing tropical gasses,
That roam her new surface like a zephyr,
A perfect condition,
But hair grows for a few more years.
(What was remarkable about the discovery of the mummified body of queen Ahhotep II, was
the fact that her hair was seven meters long. They destroyed (all evidence) of her corps out of
fear for international commotion.)
Two…
Her body is still very much alive. She is spirit in a state of unravel. The nurses didn’t care
clipping her nails in the prospect of her last exhale. There are some “newly corpses” that
inhale one last time, without exhaling, as if claiming their right to air.
Three…
The sun hung low all day today, beaming light directly onto her face. No visible offence.
She has not frown in days. Her skin is all tidied up like freshly washed jeans, folded, pleaded,
slightly loosing colour. I wish you could have seen her skin turn from soft pink into golden
brown in the course of a day, slowly transitioning from one bodily form into another. Her
voice has no echo. Her words have no weight to them.
Four…
I close my eyes for just a second when her voice hisses through my lulling, slumberous heart,
as if extracting nectar from her fruit.
“It appeared devoid of life.” she giggles, using her lips to kiss me, trying to describe this
place she sees, mouthing words, like
“plentiful stream’
and
“the gnarled old chestnut tree”
I tried to decipher the ultrasonic clicking of the paper whales hidden in her vocal cords.
Folded like origami.
When my siblings arrived late afternoon, we encircled my mother’s body like a group of
elderly dolphins when protecting the corps of a dead calf. We poked her with our noses,
burying our faces in her armpits, pinching her dry lips, sniffing the noxious smell of her
approaching corpse, in search of our own scent. Do children carry the scent of their mother?
Or does it only work one way? I still find myself carving away my skin sometimes, in search of
her odour.
… than she suddenly releases a recognisable odour, something we have smelled before, in a
kitchen somewhere. A primitive sound of utter relieve escapes our throats. I couldn’t put my
finger on it. I will probably remember it later. It might be thyme, maybe, or the smell of firmly
compressed soil when brought in contact with oxygen.
Her smell made me turn my head towards the bluish glass of the hospital windows. There
was a lot of commotion outside, heavy winds. I saw trees. I saw birds holding on to branches,
as if glued, probably just determined. I saw grass. I saw people moving behind other
windows across the hospital yard. Did they see me staring at them? I still saw the wind. I saw
blurry spots of sunlight moving, agitated, purposefully navigating through the glass.
Everything is better than to look at a deceased body. It’s boring. A body is boring when
dead. It’s so ugly. It makes no sense to add adjectives to a dead organism. It’s a waist of
words. It doesn’t belong to this world anymore, to any world for that matter. It just doesn’t
belong anymore.
3. Wake
I tell you:
When she died, he awakened
His wake is nearly done. He wants to go home. All he want to do, now, is roam through
YouTube-channels, looking for advice on how to deal with dead people that are also your
mother.
What they tell him is not real, but he knows he would like to live this life. He doesn’t have the
money resources, the time, or, to be completely honest here, the energy, but he likes their
ideas for a potential new life for him.
Everything is better than what is about to come next. He has never been an orphan before.
Nor a believer. It would be so convenient to be an orphan and a believer all at once!
He will be leaving this room soon, and will cross the corridor and find another dying woman.
One that doesn’t even look like his mother. He’ll stand next to her, hold her hand, cry his
tears directly onto her skin, put her fingers in his mouth, taste her salty leather, placing her
hand on his chest, supported by the opening of his shirt. He’ll lay down next to her and place
one arm around her pelvis, reminiscing his oldest home, his oldest nest, yearning to crawl
back in. He doesn’t care; He’ll do it himself if he has to.
He can see his mother’s tiny body with brand new eyes. She’s looking so sad (can a corpse
look sad if it will never be sad again?)… She looks distraught, as if dying was a defeat. She is
so annoying to die like this. What is he supposed to do with such a passing? Do all dead
faces cripple like that? She was old… but now she looks
He disentangles her fingers from his chest hair and places the boney meat back under the
bedspread. He looks a bit uncomfortable. He FIXATES her eyelids. The paper thin flesh
spasms, shivers, her blocked sight trying to radiate outwardly, like a ball of light. Never
seeing again.
He slowly lifts his upper lips showing his teeth, grouching. Not in a threatening way or
anything, not like a wild boar. He gives more of a grimace.
By the evening, the stormy weather outside has turned into a breeze that did nothing more
than softly move the plumage of the birds’s tales.
“She’s fondling with the troposphere,” I expressed pensively. “She always knew how to leave
a room.”