Hannah Gardiner is a writer and cultural organizer from Kitchener, Ontario. She has a master’s degree in literary studies from the University of Waterloo, where she was thrice awarded the Beltz Essay Prize. With support from Canada Council for the Arts and the Region of Waterloo Arts Fund, she is currently working on her first book.
“At the centre of this piece is an early sixteenth-century polychrome sculpture of St. Dymphna’s martyrdom, created by an anonymous artist and now housed at the Gasthuismuseum in Geel, Belgium. This piece is not just a response to the sculpture, whose severed-then-repaired head arouses curiosity about the participatory nature of this kind of narrative art, but to the highly associative, highly symbolic world this sculpture both signifies and participates in. I became quite curious about the embodied, mimetic nature of the relationship between pilgrim and saint: that pilgrims would find meaning in their life / stories by attaching them to the lives of the saints (whose life / stories themselves had meaning by virtue of being attached to the life of Christ). I thus imagined that to respond to the world of this artwork, that I must fold myself into it, not perhaps exactly as a pilgrim would have, but in the only way I could.”
What was it? The incestuous advances of her father, as in Maurice Pialat’s À Nos Amours? We watched the drama in your bed, and I saw you had no sense of her, this girl with strawberry blonde hair, running wild to escape her family. Was it this? I could never tell anymore.
We walked through the guesthouse museum, converted quarters where the mentally ill had been housed, and I stood in front of a sixteenth-century sculpture of her martyrdom group, staring at her small hands pressed together in prayer, eyes not quite open, her father’s arms bent behind his head, sword in hand to swing.
I could see the crack across her neck. Someone had foiled the art, broken off her head and the head of the black devil that rode on the back of her robin egg’s dress, teeth bared. Someone had repaired them. The sculpture’s foil or its realization. I could never tell anymore.
We laid on white sheets in an off-white room with red accent towels; our two single beds pressed together the way my younger sister and I slept as children. You kept our window open, two stories up from the thin river moat. I told you about Dymphna in bed, the seventh-century princess who fled Ireland to escape her father, or at least so it goes:
when her mother died, her father searched for someone new but could not find anyone as beautiful as his late wife except his daughter, so he decided to take her instead. Dymphna refused. She and her confessor fled by boat to Antwerp and ended up in a forest around Geel, where her father and his men eventually found them, sold out by the inscription on their monies. They beheaded them both. Pilgrims in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries came to her remains in her namesake church in Geel to cure them of their mental illnesses. Some said she had this power because she had the strength to refuse her insane father; or because her father had been healed of his insanity at her beheading; or because others had been healed of their insanities at her beheading; or because saints just become associated with the parts of themselves they lose.
We changed your name to Peter and met the retired curator in the cathedral at noon. She showed us Dymphna’s remains at the centre of the ambulatory; scenes of her story painted on her box hoisted up by an open ornamented sort of frame. I read that pilgrims walked in circles until they were healed. She pointed to the open space under the box they crawled through. I went under. I think you did too.
You saw her whole story laid out yourself, preserved around the church in stained glass windows and the enormous narrative altarpiece, holy carved wood. You studied each frame. What was it? I walked past all the statuettes and paintings of Dymphna triumphant, now upright, now unbeheaded, holding an open book in one hand and her father’s sword in her other, its tip piercing the devil beneath her feet. Reclamation, this, the logic of Christian symbolism.
I preferred the stand-alone depictions of the beheading, envied how they held still where everything ended and everything began. I thought, if you were a martyr, what someone would take from you. Your lips? Your penis? Your right foot? I had no parts of me real enough to lose. I could think of this because this church only implied death; nowhere was Dymphna actually headless. I thought of something new:
when we went to the opera that winter in Toronto, Salome’s stepfather gave her the severed head of John the Baptist. She emptied onto the ground a large glass bowl of oranges from the coffee table. The plethora of spheres rolled down in chaos off the slanted stage edge. Salome replaced the oranges with the severed head, bloodying up the glass, dripping on the ground when she picked it up again and began to kiss it fervently. She did not stop. I began to sweat, could not look, neither could I in that moment convince myself that what I saw was not real, tapping instead my legs to know they were still there, squeezing your hand, breathing, breathing, waiting.
Was it this? Was it true?
