by Nils Peterson
Charles Simic says, “[I] suspect that a richer and less predictable account of our lives would eschew chronology and any attempt to fit a lifetime into a coherent narrative and instead be made up of a series of fragments, spur-of-the-moment reminiscences occasioned by whatever gets our imagination working.”
I was reading an article yesterday on translation of Proust and the author mentions Proust’s decision to build “a whole long novel on an involuntary memory.” You’ll remember the moment. He has a madeleine cookie with his tea and all of a sudden “An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin…. Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray.” He is transported back to his childhood.
I got caught up in the idea of an involuntary memory. Michael Wood, the author of the Proust article, goes on to explain ‘Involuntary here means not only unintended but barred from the realm of intention. Whatever it is, it won’t happen if you try to make it happen.” A philosopher of language would have a ball playing with what is going on in those last two sentences, but I’m not interested this morning in going down that road because I had on Tuesday an involuntary memory. I saw the floor of the bedroom my brother and I shared in the chauffeur’s apartment above the garage in the late 30’s. I think I was eight the last time I saw that floor. It was covered in linoleum and the linoleum was divided into squares and each square had a nursery rhyme with an illustration. Mind settles for a moment on Miss Muffet and her tuffet. Part of my learning to read may have come from hearing my mother recite the rhyme and my finding it on the floor and understanding and parsing out the words. This last is a forced memory and it may not even be a true one. How different a making from the involuntary appearance in my memory of the linoleum.
There was a path to there. I was walking back from poetry salon I lead here at my old people’s home. People bring poems they want to read. Tuesday we got everything from Casey at the Bat to some lovely Robert Frost. When a person comes who didn’t know he or she was supposed to bring a poem to share, I ask for a song lyric or nursery rhyme and usually they can come up with something. The younger they are, the less likely they are to come up with a nursery rhyme. I think they’re on the endangered species list.
The subject of Memory interests me and I have written a couple of attempts to understand it. Here’s one.
Down in the Dumps
So, a man is down in the dumps – not cast down – just where he ends up after a long walk through morning and afternoon. Day has gone, but evening has not yet come.
Here is where all the marvelous stuff – the spring-sprung rumble seat, the milk wagon whose wooden horse is missing a leg, the dried cheese wrappers, the rusting tomato soup cans, the gutted paper backs, the scraps of journals – are heaped no longer propped up by usefulness.
He is no longer useful. He feels kin to the toaster with the broken cord lying on its side like a double-mouthed bottom creature tossed from the sea. And all of the bottles losing their labels – no longer wine shapes or mayonnaise shapes but collocations of curve, line, and shadow. He too is losing his labels and sits on a bucket feeling supple as a seal. He watches a vortex of seagulls whirl and settle on the fuming heaps picking, picking with strong yellow beaks. One has only one leg, but it squawks and bobs as hungrily as the rest.
The man picks up the shade of a bottle and, is it a hacksaw handle? Chink, they
go together, and chink-chink, and chinkety-chinkety-chaw-chaw. This is the melody of the blue hour. It is not melancholic.
Soon the moon will come, but She is not what he’s waiting for. He is waiting for nothing. He is banging a bottle with the lost wooden horse leg, chinkachink-achinkety-chaw-chaw-chaaah!
So memory as the dump of all experience, my own “foul rag and bone shop of the heart,” and I can go there not looking for something specific but seeing what wants to be seen today, play a little rhythmic game to please myself. Maybe something will come, maybe not. But sometimes something will demand to be seen like my linoleum or as Proust says so well: “The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea…And just as the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little crumbs of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch themselves and bend, take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, permanent and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and of its surroundings, taking their proper shapes and growing solid, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, all from my cup of tea.”
And now I can get up, walk across the nursery-rhymed floor into the living room, look down and see beyond the driveway the tennis court centered on a great lawn. No one is playing. Clearly this is not a memory but a use of memory to make, to recreate an old world. I am not remembering, but memory is a co-author. Maybe later, if the two of us can make a deal, I’ll get to see the young rich playing doubles or workmen rolling the clay court smooth and laying down the out-of-bounds lines.
I’ll be coming back to memory and the Simic quotation at the beginning of this piece.