Collage shortcuts

This collage reminds me of my childhood, when I spent six months in a kind of sanitarium in the Bavarian Alps, an institution called “High Light”, with Dutch nurses, sort of protestant nuns. I was five and my parents weren’t allowed to visit me because we lived in the British part and Bavaria was under American government. I was sent there because I was small and there was a risk of tuberculosis. These six months alone in this house were a terrible experience, as the nurses were more Sade-like creatures, having chosen me as their scapegoat. Elsewhere I described the horrible meals I was forced to swallow and that I spew out in the toilet at least once per week. I do not remember any pleasant moment, any kind word, any friend. I remember the snow at my arrival and that my father drove away. And the glorious prairies in springtime, as if heaven had come down into this hell. I guess that from this experience dates my mistrust of any religious institution or school and that this conviction has been reinforced later, when after a three months stay in paradise (Switzerland) with friendly people and my first love I integrated a first class at Waldorf school a couple of months late where a whole bunch of little devils cursed me every day. No, reality was terrible indeed, inside our home as outside, with a jealous, sadistic elder brother who would beat me up always every day and this horrible school where the teachers pretended to be good but weren’t. No wonder that I preferred to be sick instead of being in class. In those days, my parents never asked me how I was going, or how I felt. They just let me grow up, that’s all. I learnt self-suggestion, got fever and could stay in bed with books. And this so often that everybody thought that I was in a bad shape. My memories from thirteen years in this school are very poor: whenever I could I daydreamed and escaped reality. My emigration to Switzerland was a return to the three months paradise in Ouchy near Lausanne when I was six.
Now to the collage. How do I identify with the young infirm? It’s the isolation in a chaotic world where things aren’t how they should be and persons not what they were meant to. Later, when I started teaching, I was sure about one thing, to be never a Dutch nurse or a Waldorf (Rudolf Steiner) teacher. As for my art, for sure it’s strength roots in my childhood, in the necessity of escaping a cruel world.