Doctor Bloom's Story

There's an image I often have of myself, myur-self before I began to elaborate and embellish it, an image I retain from the last seconds of sleep or recover in a reliable daydream. I'm sitting in a corner of a remote upper room, casting brief glances about me and then tilting my face downwards as though to meditate on what I've just seen. In fact I have seen nothing because no one else is in the room and there is no furniture. It may be, it can hardly be anywhere else, the unused attic room of my childhood home in Amsterdam, that tall narrow Leidsegracht house -- the attic room where I would go in late March when the weather turned a little warmer, to check on the dead flies at the window ledges. They meant, that random spatter, another winter gone, and in my rudimentary way I was taking note of this sort of thing even then. If this is interesting at all it's because the passage of time is by far the deepest thing I know about life, and, in an inverse way, about art. Also because everything's connecting. I am a doctor who is abandoning medicine for literature, fitfully convinced that I have access to enough interesting words to justify this abandonment. (Doctors do this, I don't know if you've noticed. Maybe they do it because time keeps on defeating life: no matter how diligent or technically cunning they are -- the impossibly delicate filaments, tiny cameras travelling bloodstreams -- their defence of life is brief, is never enough. So they're tempted towards something with more stamina.Ars longa, etc. Though maybe not.) In my own case the "abandoning" could involve a thought confided to me a long while ago, almost certainly by my mother, who died when I was too young to benefit from such confidences -- confidences which are only now (and only imperfectly, haltingly, her voice after so long silence is windblown, is guesswork, Delphic) revealing themselves. Be that as it may, any physician or ex-physician who presumes to stray close to the making of literature has special ghosts to do battle with, in this respect I don't feel even marginally original. The roster of ex-doctors who have brought their stethoscopes, as some of them with such risible satisfaction have told us, to that larger study of humanity which prose fiction proposes! Maugham, A. J. Cronin, "that charlatan" Axel Munthe. And many more. All vastly over-rewarded in their second careers. So I thank the Fates for Chekhov, the one gifted exception to this inventory of physicians-as-kitsch-authors. And I take to myself his advice to his brother, who had scratched out a single short story and thought he too would now be on the same high road that Anton had travelled to fame, fortune and, of course, actresses: "You must drop your fucking conceit." OK, Anton. I've made a note. Remains only to tell you that in what follows here, my "story," less of me will come forward to be identified (applauded or excoriated) than some might wish. Others will be sorry that this modesty was not carried a lot further. In any case, things are missing, you'll find -- some of these due to a spasmodic tact, others simply because they've sunk too far down in the historicaloublietteto be retrieved. There are many consequences of this, all of them good. At one stroke you are relieved of the self-serving spectre of theBildungsroman. Hurray! This does not mean that I'm a completely inert observer, nose pressed to window pane, passing intimate newsflashes like bouquets behind my back into the gloved anticipatory hand of some uniformed messenger-boy while the front of me goes on goggling and eavesdropping. I do have a role here. I speak, I move about, towards the end I engage in a significant "act." But tColes, Don is the author of 'Doctor Bloom's Story', published 2004 under ISBN 9780676976021 and ISBN 0676976026.