The Chalk Man

My father's memory began to fail at around age forty. Small things, things we tend to ignore. Forgetting where he put the key, or putting things in strange places. The remote control in the refrigerator, a banana on the sideboard where we usually kept the remote. Losing his train of thought in midsentence or mixing up words. Sometimes I would see him struggle to find the right words until finally he would exchange them for something merely approximate. 

When the Alzheimer's got worse, he would mix up the days of the week, and finally, most worrisome of all to him, he forgot what day comes after Thursday. The final day of the work week simply disappeared from his memory. I still remember the expression of panic in his eyes. The loss of something so basic, something one has known since childhood, caused him to finally admit that his condition was critical.

Maybe I'm a bit of a hypochondriac about this matter. I do a lot of reading to keep my thoughts sharp, and I play Sudoku, even though I don't really enjoy it. The fact is that Alzheimer's is oftentimes passed down. I have seen what may be in the future and I would do anything to avoid it, even it that meant cutting my own life short. 

--The Chalk Man, C.J. Tudor [my translation from the Indonesian]

Isn't it odd how we often end up reading a novel or some other material that just happens to address what has been on the mind beforehand? Strange forces seem to be working together somewhere behind the scenes. Power and magic in it, as Goethe suggested. Of course, he was talking about the creative process ('Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it'). And that, as I have found, is so true.  One has himself to first strike the match before the waiting tinder can be ignited. More than this, though, I have found that whatever private ruminations one has found himself in the grip of tend somehow to activate a host of voices from every seemingly unrelated literature that one touches. One's own ruminations have ignited a larger conversation. As is happens, Tudor, through the narrative of her protagonist in The Chalk Man, has conveyed back to me, in a rather succinct way, my own thoughts of late, the helpless witness of gradual mental dissolution, the panic at the thought of critical pieces of comprehension falling away, the dread that would be dreadful indeed even to the extent of conceiving a preference for death by one's own hand. In short, nearly every book I touch lately happens to take up the subject of my own inner conversation, adding its own voice, filling out the narrative. The same thing happens through the process of writing. One takes up his pen, begins, and suddenly the universe itself seems to conspire, to collaborate, to reveal what one truly meant to say. Call it the voice of the holy spirit, if you want. Everything is forever at our fingertips, only waiting to step into the light of our minds.