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July 26th, 2009
02:18 pm - another memorable line
My new passport just arrived. It expires in 2019, which seems like such an impossibly futuristic date, to the point of being science fiction. As if I really won't be recognizable as this self then, because of the barely imaginable effects of all the prostheses and supplements and, of course, jet packs, that we'll have then. Yet it's just ten years away. It has to be, in part, because of the existence of a title like 2001 that, even after we've arrived at them so gradually (that is, just one year after another - no real time travel), any years after 2000 still seem barely credible. (At an alumni thing last fall, I was continually moved to say to the 2008 graduates, "but you aren't alumni; you're, like, from the future.") I was too young at the turning of 1984 to have heard of 1984 - but more than likely, having spent the larger part of my conscious life, at that point, in the 1980s, I couldn't see 1984 as futuristic.
Still, it's not just years after 2001. I distinctly remember sitting up in bed in my parents' house, home for Xmas while in college, and noting the new year: It scares me to see the years getting so high in number, I remember writing in my journal. I remember sitting there in the bareness of one of those very deep winter nights, suddenly feeling how uncontrollably and absurdly time moved. It wasn't something I thought about a lot, although I know that I worried about it in some form, at least as early as high school. But that was one of those moments when it really hit me, like the reality of everything else that's out of our hands and barely glimpsed. And now, I realize, that whenever I see a year in the future, I hear in my mind that awkward, frightened little line.
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July 24th, 2009
03:46 pm - memorable lines
Is there a special term for a highly associative memory that returns as a complete sentence, like a line from a drama you once acted in? I’ve decided to begin a little catalogue of actual sentences that consistently—inevitably, in fact—surface when I encounter some particular object or action. The latter act as nearly unswerving prompts, as if they were both stage props and prompters for spoken lines. Or the chotchkies inside a memory palace. I can’t not hear the sentences they cue – the neural pathway from one to the other must be incredibly well trodden and nearly weedless. (Sometimes when I stop to think about them, about what incredibly resilient little verbal tags they are, I think of the best part (the whole point, really) of that Tobias Wolff short story, “Bullet in the Brain,” in which the dying man remembers the sound of one sentence. Still, that’s not what I’m talking about.)
The jade plant that sits on the windowsill behind my desk: They thrive on neglect, is what the woman at the greenhouse said, to me or my mother, or to both of us at once – I can’t remember which. I just remember the sentence, although the way that I remember the inflection may be completely off. In the way I remember it, there’s something very decadent about how she’s saying it, as if she’s endorsing some kind of debauchery. And the word thrive is always italicized, like it would be if Salinger had written the sentence for one of his characters. I can’t decide how often to water the jade plant. Frankly, its succulent petals look a little sere. But every time I do water it, I wonder if I’m not neglecting it enough.
Putting on shoes and socks, most usually my running shoes and socks: We were trying to figure out if it was faster to go ‘sock, shoe; sock, shoe’ or to go ‘sock, sock; shoe, shoe.’ I remember Mandy A. (who would later, I understood, insist on being called Amanda), probably at a high school cross country meet or practice, recounting a conversation she’d had with someone else about which was the most efficient method. I usually go sock, shoe; sock, shoe, because then one only has to address each foot once. But I never can prevent myself from wondering if I really should go sock, sock; shoe, shoe – if it’s more efficient, really, to repeat the same motions all at once, like a very abbreviated assembly line.
Swallowing pills: …or how you swallow pills in the wrong order. T, listing what he knew about me, one night – on, I am sure, that stained, secondhand mattress that was supposed to be an improvement over the old futon that I’d inherited from B. B, who was a chemist, and very methodical, imparted to me his method of swallowing pills, which is to sip a little water and hold it in your mouth before dropping the pill(s) down your gullet. This way you don’t taste the bitterness of the pill on your tongue. Even though I always think of this alone, from the rest of the list that I mostly can’t remember (I think I remember this because I was startled and charmed that T had noticed such a small habit), I’m still convinced it is the better way to swallow my pills.
…and flossing teeth: why would anyone floss their teeth after brushing? T said this to my mother upon first meeting her (I can remember us all sort of awkwardly trying to walk together from the B&N in Union Square, where we met, to the Zen Palate for lunch). I think it was apropos of something not so far off from the list above, but catered to parents, although now I can’t really recall. I only remember my mother not thinking it strange at all, and responding in that flat, conversation-killing way that she does, and T pointing to the incident later, as half-hearted example of how he’d tried to make small talk with my parents. As it happens, I now floss before I brush my teeth which is on account of T, who somehow influenced my teeth flossing but not my pill swallowing. Again, I always reconsider the logic of the order whenever I begin, but go on in the way I’ve become accustomed to.
Tying a necktie: P was saying how he’d like to teach someone how to kiss, because, that way, the girl you taught would think of you whenever she kissed someone – like the way you think of the person who taught you to tie a necktie whenever you have to tie one. I remember my high school friend S saying this to me in the basement of his parents’ split level home, where I went when P was away – not because I liked it there, but because S was so closely associated with P. I remember S recounting this idea of P’s (although I feel like the necktie idea is something they’d snagged from a popular movie), but I remember feeling cheated by the way he’d introduced it. He had asked me first, almost as if poised to diagnose something about me, whether P was the first person I’d kissed. He was, in fact, and he did indeed have to teach me how to kiss, but I remember wanting to seem more nonchalant and worldly to S, and so I’d lied. Then, when he’d followed up his question with a shrug and the potential mnemonic of kissing from P, I wished that I could tell him the truth.
P was wrong about the kissing, because memory’s not always predictable. But he was still half-right – whenever I see a tie being tied, I hear S’s voice recounting P’s theory.
The old saw of Pascal’s – “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connaît point.” Or, as I more often come across it: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know”: You're petitioning to your feelings with rationalizations. Feelings don't always sign legibly, though: beware the forged names. I really just remember the middle part, but I always remember it: Feelings don't always sign legibly. This, from an email from SR, advising me some years ago on matters of the heart. When I related it to T, he observed very passionately, “This is why we like S so much: every so often, she’ll do something like paraphrase Pascal in her own idiom to make it completely relevant to us.” Or something like that. I only clearly remember the middle part of what SR wrote, but I always do.
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July 5th, 2009
04:01 pm - architectural anatomy
Last weekend, on a walking tour of historic homes, I was reminded how much I've always liked functionally obsolete architectural features: the widow's walk, the porte cochère. I like them much in the same way I like the idea of functionally obsolete anatomy, like the appendix and male nipples. To really consider them, one has to consider how they would have been used, a way of life when they were common. And now they remain, like slightly mysterious monuments - not entirely obsolete, just functionally so.
And then this correspondence, the anatomical with the architectural, made me wonder that there aren't more architectural terms taken from human anatomy. There are fewer than one might think, but more than I knew of: eyebrow window, bellied balconet, hipped gable, ear (?), knee brace.
Which made me recall the conversation in which I was told that balcon was French slang for bustline, which wasn't and isn't anyting that I'd ever heard. I recall him (this was no one really important, but his moments of crudeness, which might have been just amusing in most other people, came from being just slightly an octave off, which made it seem more violent than funny) smiling smugly, saying, titty is to torso as balcon is to maison. Which made me think of The Rape.
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April 10th, 2009
08:24 am - methods
I also make it a rule never to read too far ahead in the book I’m translating – that way everything is fresh and new, and I can’t form any preconceived notions about what will come next. I figure the author never had the luxury of reading his book beforehand, so why should I?
--Charlotte Mandell, interviewed
It’s a physical feeling, and it’s a deeply pleasurable one. You can get something like it by reading the poem out loud off the page, but the sensation is far more powerful when the words come from within. (The act of reading tends to spoil physical pleasure.) It’s the difference between sight-reading a Beethoven piano sonata and playing it from memory — doing the latter, you somehow feel you come closer to channeling the composer’s emotions.
--Jim Holt, "The Case for Memorizing Poetry"
Being, somehow, Cervantes, and arriving thereby at the Quixote--that looked to Menard less challenging (and somehow less interesting) than continuing to be Pierre Menard and coming to the Quixote through the experiences of Pierre Menard.
'Not for nothing having three hundred years elapsed, freighted with the most complex events. Among those events, to mention but one, is the Quixote itself.'
--Borges, trans. Hurley
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