Research note 11: A Birth Chart Made of Fragments

“We are what we imagine ourselves to be.”
—Kurt Vonnegut

It has been a week of travelling. Driving, sailing, trains, buses and, earlier yesterday, flying to Hamburg.

I have been thinking about this speeded-up version of myself, moving rapidly from one place to another, being stuffed with memories as I go. What will I remember of this time in ten years?

I have an idea, but I don’t know for sure.

Life has a way of rearranging what we expect or imagine lies ahead of us. Or perhaps it isn’t life at all. Perhaps it is the pull of the planets as they circle while the earth spins beneath us.

I know almost nothing about astrology, but recently it has been finding me.

I thought I might make a birth chart, only to discover that I need the precise time at which I was born. My mother, now in her ninetieth year, cannot remember it. This is hardly surprising. She gave birth to twelve children over twenty years, the first seven—including two sets of twins—within the first five years of her marriage.

I was born in the upstairs bedroom of a small rented house on Main Street in Beragh, County Tyrone, This, I know. My brother Eamon, thirteen months older than me, was born there too. The other ten children were born, before and after us, in the County Hospital in Omagh.

When I asked my mother about my birth, she remembered an early morning, a doctor or perhaps the local midwife—or both—coming to the house, and my father being out hunting rabbits with his brother.

But she could not remember whether that was my birth or Eamon’s.

I like that our arrivals have become entangled in her memory.

I would ask Eamon what he remembers being told, but I can’t. He died suddenly ten years ago this year, when he was just fifty years old.

I miss him.

My father registered the births of all his children, but only the date was required. No time. No weather. No record of who was in the room, who was sleeping nearby, or what could be heard from the street outside.

I have wondered if somewhere in an archive there might be a midwife’s notebook with the missing hour written down. So far, I have found nothing.

Perhaps my full birth chart will never exist.

Arriving in Hamburg to meet an old friend, I discover that the Kunsthalle is free to visit that evening. I go alone to see Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog.

I have seen the painting reproduced countless times, but standing before it is something else.

A written description hardly does it justice, but what I see is a solitary figure of a man standing high on rocks above a valley, his back turned, looking towards a landscape partly visible and partly obscured.

For a moment, the figure becomes my brother Eamon.

Then it becomes me.

Standing there, I think of Walter Benjamin’s idea of aura, that strange entanglement of distance and nearness. Eamon is impossibly far away and, for a moment, very close.

Earlier that day I had been thinking about where our journeys begin, and about how little we can know of what lies ahead. Now I find myself standing in front of a painting made more than two hundred years ago, feeling unexpectedly close to someone no longer here but still with me.

Things find one another.

A birth without an hour.
A brother.
A journey.
A painting.
A figure looking into fog.

What will I remember of this week in ten years’ time?

I don’t know.

But perhaps this is the beginning of it.

What Lies Ahead (collage, 2026)©️