Everything is an illusion. We live in the world of illusions. – Matthew
During my childhood, my mother was a devotee of self-proclaimed psychics and mystics like Uri Geller. She was part of the New Age movement in the seventies that saw signs in coincidences and spoke to spirits over Ouija boards. In this environment, it’s no surprise that I actually believed that I was psychic. A typical child, I was intuitive and good at guessing and saw things that adults missed because they were too busy looking. Whenever I had a psychic moment I would share it with my mother and she would beam with pride.
When I was twelve, my mother befriended Carla, a spiritual medium who lived in our neighbourhood in Chicago. On summer afternoons when I was off from school, my mother would suggest visiting Carla, in part because she had air-conditioning and we didn’t. I would have lemonade, my mother and Carla iced tea. We would talk about the latest films, pop music and the way clothes’ styles were changing. All of a sudden our chatter was interrupted – Carla’s voice would drop two octaves as her spirit guide, John, spoke through her. He used biblical language and advised us in ways that sounded to me suspiciously like the horoscope pages. ‘Worry not about the future for it is full of mystery. It is best to wait for things to come.’ That was one of John’s pearls of wisdom. My mother would nod profusely and thank John for talking to us. John would leave and Carla would go limp like a ragdoll and get back her energy with another iced tea and chocolate donut.
While I was out with friends, my mother would visit Carla on her own. I always learned about these meetings afterwards and, even though I had my doubts about John, I felt excluded. I was at that age where I needed to belong to one group or another.
By the end of that summer, I countered Carla’s John with Matthew – a name chosen to fit my mother’s Christian-spirituality phase. I would get an idea from one of her books or from a self-help coach on daytime television and attribute it to my spirit guide Matthew. Once he said, “The peoples of the world will have peace when they find inner peace.” And another time it was “All things are beautiful in themselves,” purloined from Kahlil Gibran. But I couldn’t bring myself to put on a fake baritone voice. I didn’t need to. Anytime I quoted Matthew, I became my mother’s best friend – mission accomplished.
Unlike my early childhood with psychic moments, I never believed that I was or could ever become a spiritual medium. By this time, Uri Geller had been debunked on national television when he couldn’t divine where objects were hidden or bend any spoons. And in sitcoms and films, the psychic charlatan became a stock character set up for mockery.
Within a year, I had grown up to appreciate my own friends more and the need to belong less. Feeling guilty for taking advantage of my mother’s gullibility, I gently phased Matthew out. I would tell her that I simply hadn’t heard from him as if he were an old friend who didn’t keep in touch.
Years later when I was in my thirties, visiting my mother, she asked if I was still psychic, like I was as a child. I explained that I was still intuitive and good at guessing, but that I didn’t see those things as psychic anymore – and there were plenty of times when my feelings and hunches proved terribly inaccurate.
I could tell that my response disappointed her.
“Have you heard from Matthew?”
“No,” was all I said.
Until the end of her life, my mother still consulted psychics and mystics – and believed her daughter once channelled a spirit named Matthew.
eggs on demand and wants to raise a chick of her own. But when she manages to escape the coop, she can no longer lay eggs. She happens upon an egg without its mother and lays on that until it hatches only to discover that it’s a duckling. This metaphorical tale raises issues about surrogacy, motherhood, tolerance and independence. Perhaps a chick-lit version (no pun intended) of Animal Farm, it packs a punch with its directness and use of animals who are all too human. With illustrations by Japanese artist Nomoco, this little gem is best read in its paper version.
rongly disagrees with and that she shouldn’t run away from them. While Scout is the symapthetic protagonist here, I wasn’t completely taken in by her. She says that all people are equal, but she also believes that blacks are intellectually inferior and says that she wouldn’t date a black man. It made for some uncomfortable reading, but I pressed on in order to hear Atticus defend himself, which he does in a heated exchange with Scout – there are a few of these issue-focused arguments in the book, reminding me of two-hander political plays. What Atticus displays is a reasoned use of logic to justify his racism (which isn’t of the KKK variety, but racist nonetheless). But his logic only works if the premises about African-Americans were true, and most modern day readers would say they are not. This is one of these stories that needs to be placed in its social-historical context to be enjoyed. In the end, at least it hints that we are all fallible and subject to weak reasoning.
Paola Trimarco 