Common Room Rocking Horse

Translated from the Danish by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen.

Someone did give birth to me. Why remains unclear. Maybe they wanted to be loved, or it just sort of happened. It’s unlikely they’re alive. Then again, modern medicine. But so much time has passed since the fruitless event. The one who gave birth to me and the other, him, who may or may not have wanted something out of it other than to unload. And what exactly did she want. To be loved for it, or after it, to be loved by him, by me, by a third party. It’s not unthinkable, though it does appear remote and foolish. Why did she grow me. From the moment they fished me out, I was never alone again, never again part of someone else. I sat there like an utterance, the answer to a question no one had asked or thought needed asking. With these saggy cheeks and dopey eyebrows. I am not suggesting anyone ever wished to give birth to something like me specifically. But it is a common assumption. Others suppose so when one walks by. Born after all, brought into being. It is what others assume. One doesn’t even have to walk anywhere, one can sit, or not even that. Just being there, that’s enough to make them come over and make assumptions. That someone willed you into the world. And the world will not leave you be. Not once you’ve been willed into it, or supposedly willed into it. Then they wrap you up in language and table manners to make it look like there’s a purpose behind it all, like it’s not just, not just nothing, nothing in the world, but a something which although neither imagined nor hoped for did sprout in someone’s belly once, was fished out and given language and table manners. Wrapped in diapers so as not to sully the world, not toddle off and make it more sordid than necessary. And from then on never alone again, never again a part of someone. Which everybody was, beyond a doubt, at some point and this everybody does include me.

To lean back and forth on the common room rocking horse, thinking that I was part of something, a motion if nothing else, that might eclipse my pure presence for a moment. Pure, as in not part of anything; hardly counted, hardly desired, and if desired then not fitting. A useless spare part grown from a discontinued model as if of its own accord, which is precisely not the case. It’s all very imprecise.

But on the rocking horse there were moments of oblivion, there was unity so to speak. The rocking horse had no purpose other than this: granting me escapes from my rather unique existence, or my utterly unique existence to be exact – unique though never alone, that is to say, uniquely futile, and only in futility ever truly alone – that was the purpose of the common room rocking horse. I rocked and I forgot a little and I forgot a little.

The rocking horse wasn’t exclusively for toddlers. But apart from me only toddlers coveted it. Pulling a diapered kid down from it wasn’t hard. Leaving it to wail on the floor, another chance to lose the sense of self. I rocked back and forth leaning against the horse’s neck, sticking my index fingers through the hole that made up its eyes so that my fingertips met inside the horse’s head, and I uttered a sound not entirely in tune with the little one’s wail but more like an accompaniment, a singalong to the best of my ability. 

The toddlers weren’t the problem, although they did cause trouble whenever the adults grew tired of the racket. When a small one made too much noise one could sense our shared agenda: to be part of something larger, however insignificant the part and however meaningless the whole. And even if the crier only cried for himself, the crying was something to partake in, to dissolve into – dissolve into tears as they say, and I include myself among them, with their table manners and terms – even if I don’t remember ever having let myself dissolve quite like that. Tears don’t come easy, they never have. And when they do appear they don’t act as a dissolvent. On the contrary, they seem to enhance the impression of something personal about me. And so he sits, dripping from under his heavy brows. But tears were something to envy if nothing else, and in this envy, partly dissolved by my rocking, the sound of crying was something to sing about.

It’s reasonable to suspect that I was once a vessel of impersonal tears, a voice in the chorus of ear-splitting screams over having been put here. A scream not pertaining to this body. Nor whether anyone had wished for it or held any opinion regarding its birth. Or even entertained notions of being loved by it or being loved by a third party because of its excretion. I must have had the capacity, before everything else happened, to cry like that, dissolved, so that life itself could cry through me. Bullshit.

The problem was the big ones, same age or older, laden with notions of being someone, let loose in common space with kids to beat and objects to beat them with, a wish to overcome a certain measure of resistance. They were searching for a scoop of bravado in the horse riding tot they were punishing. Not only for the tot to fall off the rocking horse but to bleed a little maybe, maybe cry, and if so, cry feebly and softly. Without spirit or resistance, a cheapskate who won’t share his pain.

One is forced to become someone because others feel that need. They need to distinguish themselves from relatable but more pitiful peers. Torn from the rocking horse myself, unable to cry about it in a meaningful way. Not meaningful, not becoming. Just a very personal whimper. Seems to bring out the porcine quality of the nose under the bulky brows, which hardly improves the design.

The dinner table provided another shot at self-oblivion, in the intake of sustenance, the act of mastication, the enforced quiet, the sight of the long, ungainly faces benched around the meal and asked to shut up, ‘Chew! Silence! Table manners!’ So that they could be all set and nourished for their continued gawking, wondering why the hell anyone would have wished to give birth to you at all. Their faces elongated with the chewing motions which took place under supervision though not exactly close supervision. The food had to be chewed properly, mashed to a slush, a gruel in the oral cavity, before further passage was granted to the boy’s throat and on, to become harmlessly uniform chyme inside his gut. A shared dejection shone from the munching faces. Long, exposed and silent. Even the eyes were not merely wide open and distant, but stretched out too.

Such as that dog is, who by barking craves,

And quiet grows soon as his food he gnaws,

For to devour it he but thinks and struggles,

The like became those muzzles filth-begrimed…

How I relished those sessions. Here at last was community, in torpid melancholy, a half hour of forced brotherhood at the home.

Before and after the meal each face was like a fist, clenched around each seething will. Knuckle-eyes everywhere in common room and dormitory. In the dormitory, though, they could dissolve by other means. When they lay hissing and pulling, fists clenched around their pee-pees. What took place here was not an elongation but a further clenching of the faces. Knuckle-eyes straining to white until sort of busting, legs twitching and toes kneading the collectively farted up air. Even though they did it together – simultaneously, I mean – it was not a shared experience but a highly individual fade or retreat to an overarching community, vaguely discernible in the gleam across their spasmodic faces or as echoing faintly in their grunts.

At least I recognised here the urge to disappear into something, and when they lay limp and spent, striped with seminal fluid down the front of their pajamas, a calm descended not unlike the one imposed by ‘Silence! Table manners!’ Where there is no true community to be had one may still find something recognisable, and this includes me too.

Then came other journeys, the same rocking back and forth turned to propulsion, or an aimless drift into the world at least. People needed to see my ticket, stamp my passport, rummage through my bag. Most acted as though my drift had a purpose. The fields were green and golden streaks smeared along my vision. On occasion: a mountain, an inlet, a high-rise. Clouds and the chimneys of incineration plants. Some things appeared to stand still and not blur completely into motion. I collected the moments: the trembling nostrils of a fellow passenger. An old woman in the seat across from mine, offering me a pastille from a pretty antique tin. Or maybe she didn’t. But there was a delightful creak when she opened and closed the lid of her ornate reliquary for one of the ancient goodies. That she could resist the temptation to do it constantly. Creak, creak, I heard the sound only once through the entire trip but I’ve kept it ever since.

Hours on platforms and in waiting rooms. To be waiting is to be something. Awaiting the motion itself as well as to be part of it, a presence subject to a purpose. Compartments heavy with human smells, thickened by the toilets around us. Our sweat glands, rotting teeth and dirty rectums.

We were in the stench together, surely – the blurred beauty of the landscapes may not have registered with everybody, but the stench must have, we created and perceived it together and I was certainly a part of that too.

Only the rocking horse’s eyes were free of hate. Technically, it was one eye, a hole drilled through its head, all the way through the slab of wood. Round and empty, unity and absence combined. If one was to imagine its perspective, what that tunnel saw, it must have been a gaze unfamiliar with the outer world, instead turned inward from either side, meeting itself somewhere around the center. A determined withdrawal, unlike my own scattered attempts at dissolution. No knuckle-eyes could ever meet that gaze.

It was impossible to see both sides of the hole at once. Viewed frontally, only its slant forehead and the ragged leather remaining of its left ear could be seen – the right ear was long eroded by toddlers’ chewing and fondling. No eyes were indicated at all from the front. Kneeling by the animal’s flank, staring through the hole, one’s vision vanished inside the animal and came back on the other side. The evasion was total and admirable. Contact was impossible and yet the gaze was comforting. Sitting on the common room rocking horse, I leaned forward and vanished a bit in its rocking, forgot a little. From each side I stuck my fingers inside the eyehole. Where the fingertips met we were together.