journal of no memory

One question last night posed to the author concerned his inspiration for a trope that emerges in three of his novels, whether he had personal experience that contributed to his use of the device or whether he simply saw great promise in employing it, to which he responded yes, he had experience with it and then detailed the experience with it, provided details and dates no names and places and events, all of which happened to him, at least. He was present for the events that occurred and saw them play in front of him. The participants were people. In the promise of these meetings he saw potential to explore more fully the disconnect (ah, there it is again, but reality is nothing if not persistent) between us and how these meeting sought to fill or lessen that gap. And so he wrote it down and wrote it down and made all of the participants fictional and all of the details fictional (inasmuch as a glass of water is fictional, or and overweight person scratching his stomach is fictional) and it became representative of a bigger idea, and then he repeated it and it became a trope.

This frustrates people, I’ve found: that fiction is just removing some details and adding others.

I could not finish the book; reading it had become a lifestyle choice rather than an entertainment. It is the same with Celine or with Proust or Pound or any of the others…the endless circular study of a life bolstered by fiction’s great streamlining…interviews with real men who met real men and tell you the truth about these meetings that never happened with men who don’t exist, these things the men never said all true…you could spend years with this book, either in it or beside it. It is a fine book. It will exist when I am old, and I can return to it then.

For so long the space between recording and memory has been short: if you do not record you do not remember. If someone sends you an email from four years prior and you cannot recall a single moment you yourself are describing, it sends this belief into the sky. To examine the importance of memory is a depressing exercise, as no one can retain everything. One is inclined to say that distraction plays a part in the inability to remember, in that one might forget the very thing one intended to recall when one is distracted, but who is not to say that the distraction itself was the thing to be remembered? What this means is that to keep in perfect isolation to avoid distraction would be a life that provides nothing worth remembering, but that the manifold bits of life worth keeping scream for attention and drown each other out.

We have the capacity to remember dreams and to be surprised by beauty; on every beautiful day, if we are right, we open our eyes and are happy to see it. Our memory for beauty diminishes as we sink and so as we re-encounter it the joy we feel is undiminished, or greater perhaps if it triggers the old memories of beauty and we experience not only the happiness at what is before us but happiness at the remembrance that such things exist at all. I suppose that depends on how far one has sunk. I think of this today as it is sunny and clear, unhumid and comfortably warm. This is beauty for us because the light and the warmth please us physically and psychologically, and the acceptance of this happiness begins to please us spiritually. Is that what it is? Not just happiness, but the acceptance of happiness that brings peace? As our memories of heat and cold collect we are only surprised by the change in season as our bodies age and receive the temperature more sensitively. When what we expect and what we feel are divergent we feel surprise. I do not know what this means then that we are all surprised constantly by beauty.

Mary, I saw your shoulder
why don’t you come over here?
Mary I saw your shirt
and now my time’s run up;
I couldn’t believe them
when it was snowed on the pavement
but this game was young
and now my dear I’m called back home.
Mary, though, I saw you smile
and I’m all ruffled feathers
only meant to lay down;
I don’t have it anymore
but I’m not lost.
Just lend me something.

End it. Make no play about
It, anymore, but cut it
And bag it and dump it
To compost. This all is
What has wrought you;
Iron and days and time
The forge of all this you own:
120 by 80, your lot, your home.
Winter’s coming, the birth of
The year, the beginning of time -
For nothing has nothing created;
That is the nature of things.

All this reading, all these years
(Oh not that many but then
One score and ten is something,
No?) Yes - and
Now it is time to rake up
The remnants of the season
And stuff them tight and
Bring them to soil. End it:
Today, before they arrive.

She looks on through the window
Briefly, her arms in her sweater
And her mind on the peace,
On the table leaves and candles
And you hold fast the handle
Of the rake and pull it to work
For once.

The East and West are fences
You didn’t build, the North is
Cold and South is the Earth and
Home you’ve filled: here are
The cats you feed, here is
The life you lead, here is
The blood she bleeds, here is
The book you read. The house
You own. It is done.
You are here, and this
Is yours. It is done.

A fundamentalist cult in Russia waited in a cave for the end of the world, which is happening in May. We are not alone and the mark of the true believer is the knowledge and faith that all of this is over.

We talked a bit outside about the poor in Brazil, about a nine year-old sleeping in a doorway and the American response: “this happened in the States, well, there’d be a revolution!” It happens in the States but out of sight. A police officer pulled up behind my friend’s car to begin issuing parking meter tickets; my friend and I walked inside the cafe still laughing talking and as we got in he walked upstairs and I sat at my table with a book out. I glanced up once to see him leave through the back door. I watched the cop examine his car my friend’s car, give it a ticket; Illinois temp tags months, years out of date and most likely forged anyway; a child’s carseat (a carseat!) and the windows are open and the doors are unlocked and the stereo plays French hip hop and the quarterpanel is scuffed and it can jump up to 110 on the freeway in seconds. The cop wrote out more tickets and disappeared down the block, and I waited reading drinking coffee, hand on my phone. I waited. The cop waited. The cop drove away. As I opened my phone I saw my friend run over from across the street “I watched from the other alley had to run a bit; the car is reported missing you know” and he drove off to collect his son and I went to work.

I found her seashells, the shells from Cozumel in the drawer today while I was cleaning: they are part of a future that won’t exist, a shared past that was lived and their collection was predicated on a history that won’t be made, on an idea that is dead. Because they were gathered in a time where something was alive they were part of that life and intended to be used to further that life but that life is dead, has died, so now they are nothing but calcium. They are stones gathered by a girl a long time ago for some purpose that no longer exists. They are a strange thing in a desk drawer that must probably be thrown in a dumpster: these things each one selected over another, each one chosen, each one part of the greater plan. Look at the table: before it was bought to suit a life, to be service to a life that is dead now. So it is just wood. It is an object. The life that was injected into it has been removed. It is hard to say if the table is dead. Does it still possess the memory of its life of service? Are the imprints part of the finish? The faith that we had in the table, the way we saw it, the people who touched it will never be together again; the table will no longer be in the same sight. It is now consigned to wait, to see if it will live again in service to another life. The shells have less life than furniture. They have no use to anyone anymore where the table may live again. The shells were a personal choice, each one selected specifically, each one embraced into a life that no longer exists. They are less than orphans now.

While we were there — no, as we walked in, I saw a man I see quite often in the neighborhood. Everything is the same about him: always a jacket and jeans, always the haircut. He is always alone. Tonight he was eating alone without even a book. What do you do? I have done it and had to stare out the window or at the wall to avoid staring at people. I see this man in the same cafe every morning, and I only know this because of all the mornings I have spent in this cafe. I saw him once become confused and agitated when he arrived and a woman was sitting at his usual table. He was visibly uncomfortable as he set up his computer at the table beside it. Only once have I seen him converse with someone and in the course of it he complained about another man I know, saying that he didn’t know why this man was so popular at the open mic nights at this same cafe. He didn’t like that this other man was so well liked because he didn’t see that he had any talent at all. He promised to come to a new open mic and bring his guitar. Then he was alone again when the man he spoke with was gone. Tonight he ate alone, left alone. After we ate we left for gelato and as we walked past the restaurant later to collect the car I saw another man I know, someone I knew well years ago sitting with his new girlfriend, who I also know, though from very different circumstances. They were holding hands and he was explaining something and the look on her face betrayed her contempt, her utter disbelief that she could sit there with him and entertain some notion that they were about to eat bad food together in a cobbled-together restaurant. It was though she couldn’t believe he was talking at all, much less care about what he was saying. He was wearing the same clothes I saw him wear a decade ago. It is always like that in this city. Wherever I go I see the past.