And what does Nat want? “I don’t know”.

FRI APR 4

I dropped by at Nat’s gloomy house today. It was ages before he came to the door. He offered me tea but, as I am trying to cut down my caffeine addiction, I had to refuse.

I asked him if he had been doing any drawing. “A bit”, by which he meant up to three hours a day. Quite a lot, really.

I coaxed him into showing me a few of the macerated specimens. His subject matter had changed from heads to foetuses. They are unlike the vaguely demoniac embryos seen in Odilon Redon or Aubrey Beardsley’s work, said to have been inspired, in Redon’s case, by the artist and his sister performing an abortion on their own baby. Rather, they are frightful, disfigured creatures with no control over their existences, leading horrific sublives, wrought from Nat’s own experience with which primal therapy had put him in contact. One picture was particularly engrossing: a vortex of violent volutes, with voodoo babies and foetuses banging their heads against brick walls. Some of these offspring looked far too intelligent, like mad professors, but this illusion was caused by their circular spectacle-like eyes and high embryonic foreheads.

I told Nat that I had been in contact with Dr. Blitzein, a Scot of Germanic ancestry, and the country’s leading expert on regression and primal therapy. Blitzein had shown some interest in the Snoxell case and as I imparted this information to Nat his countenance took on the mingled pride and self-disgust of the Victorian circus freak one knows so well from early photographs. Nat could hardly hide his joy that his life should warrant such illustrious attention: he has always thought that he is special. I asked him if I could borrow the “foetal-vortex” picture for photocopying, in order to allow Blitzein to peruse the imagery. Under the circumstances, Nat seemed only too pleased to oblige. He gave me an old school file to carry the piece away in.

WED APR 9

Blitzein was not too impressed with Nat’s drawing. Perhaps it lost something in the mechanical reproduction process. The photocopy I sent to him was a little blurred. Still his curiosity was sufficiently roused—in a “sanitarium of art” manner—to phone me this morning. His interest lies at the very frontiers of medicine and not with its social applications. He went along with my theory about Oval Wood being a symbolic womb where, due to “emotional pressure”, Nat had reenacted what he had experienced as a violent birth. Blitzein suggested that there might be something in Nat’s recent history, more tenable than “emotional pressure”, which had led to the suicide attempt. He wasn’t surprised to hear about Nat’s gruesome collection of weird things. However, he spent most of our telephone conversation speculating on Russian embryo experiments, about which he has heard bleak rumours. We concluded that Nat seemed to have some unfinished business and a few more regression sessions might clear up the case.