TUCKAHOE TRANSFORMED

A Writer'sCupbboard

Robert Grudin, all Rights Reserved, 2021

THE CURVATURE OF TIME

MEMORY AS EXPERIENCE

A Meditation on the Mind’s Revival of Knowledge

by Robert Grudin

Copyright © 2019 by Robert Grudin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

MEMORY AS EXPERIENCE

PART ONE: IMPACT OF MEMORY

1-Remembering Surprise......................................................................................................4

2-Fouschki’s Garden................................................................................................................6

3-Memory as chaos and Symmetry..........................................................................................9

4-Official Accounts.................................................................................................................11

5-Megamemory: World War II................................................................................................13

PART TWO:MEMORY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHARACTER........................16

6-Memory as Personal and Social Glue..................................................................................17

PART THREE:  EBBS AND FLOWS OF MEMORY............................................................23

7-A Chronicle of Childhood...................................................................................................26

8-From Mendocino to Asbury Park........................................................................................31

9-Maintaining Memory...........................................................................................................42

PART FOUR: CREATIVE MEMORY..................................................................................47

10-Memory and Imagination....................................................................................................48

11-Imagination as Memory.......................................................................................................54

12-Recovering the Past.............................................................................................................56

(Aside)......................................................................................................................................59

PART FIVE:ECCENTRICITIES.............................................................................................60

13-Private Eternities................................................................................................................61

14-Memory as an Athletic Pursuit..........................................................................................63

15-Threshold Memories....................................................................................................,....65

16-False Memoriies and Scapegoating.................................................................................. 71

17-A Prayer to a Memory.......................................................................................................73

18-The Writer’s Craft.............................................................................................................76

19–Dublin, November 19–22, 1960: The Memory that Wrote Itself.....................................79

PART SIX: MEMORY AS ART AND ARCHIVE...........................................................83

20-Music as Memory: Homage to Johann Abraham Peter Schulz.........................................84

21-Memory as Social Archive: Homage to Studs Terkel.......................................................86

22-Consciousness and Memory..............................................................................................88

PART SEVEN: MEMORY AS GEOGRAPHY....................................................................92

23-Visiting the Past................................................................................................................93

24-Freedom and Forgetting..................................................................................................105

25-Usesof Social Memory and Forgetting............................................................................107

26-Navigating the Forgotten.................................................................................................109

PART EIGHT:THE POETICS OF AMNESIA....................................................................110

27-Memory Lost and Regained............................................................................................111

PART NINE:MEDIATING MEMORY...............................................................................120

28-Unpleasant Memories......................................................................................................121

29-Remembered Nightmares................................................................................................124

30-Guilt, Shame, Regret.......................................................................................................126

(Aside)........................../............/..........................................................................................129

31-Memory as Microscope...................................................................................................131

32-Memory and Love...........................................................................................................133

PART TEN: MEMORY MECHANIZED...........................................................................136

33-Memorizing Identity.......................................................................................................137

34-Memoirs, Memoranda, Memorabilia, Memorials, Mnemosyne.....................................139

PART ELEVEN: MEMORY AND THE SELF..................................................................142

35-Memoir as Excuse: Hemingway’s Legend of Paris........................................................143

36-Digital Disinformation:  Microsoft att the OK Corral....................................................148

37-“Step Back and Contemplate”........................................................................................152

PART TWELVE: MINING THE PAST.............................................................................154

38-Memory, Beauty, Justice, Symmetry.............................................................................158

Surprise is the essence of exprience, the vodka of time

05352

PART I

IMPACT OF MEMORYRemembering Surprise

Have you ever watched a horse eat an apple?  I myself have never seen such a vivid expression of gusto and joy. Nor is the experience exclusively visual.  Just listening to the thunderous chomp and crush adds a rowdy and transforming  new dimension.   I keep that image in memory, like a kind of locket or sacred artifact, so that I will never will lose touch with that feeling of artless enthusiasm, of unmitigated engagement in life.

Another example of symbolic memory portrays my own encounter with another rounded fruit.  Twenty years ago, when I first took possession of our Hawaiian house, I walked in the garden and discovered a tiny orchard of citrus.  I looked for something in season, and soon came upon a large ripe tangerine that hung within arm’s reach.  I grabbed it and pulled, but it wouldn’t come off until I outright yanked it.  Yank I did, and when at last the fruit pulled free of its stem, my airspace exploded into a cloud of tangy seductive zest that was, more than any poem or drama I had read, a harbinger of life itself.

Why did both of these memories speak so intimately to me?  Memories of smell and taste speak directly to what’s inner and primordial – after all, smell and taste are a newborn’s first sensations, long before sight and hearing have been calibrated.  In a  page or two I will add to this list by referencing the brashly sexy taste and feel of fresh figs.

Other memories resist exclusion.  When I turned three years old, my parents gave me a party, inviting two of my future elementary school classmates and a grownup couple named O’Rourke.  Their present for me came in a hatbox-sized parcel, and when I pulled off the lid, three jumbo paper pompoms jumped out and rolled across the floor.  That was the O’Rourke present – the mere surprise of it -- and I would keep it permanently.  Especially after I learned, years later, that on that very day, in a country halfway around the world, my future wife was born.

Joy.  Life.  Surprise.  These are words for the feelings suggested by these memories.  But the memories just cited themselves, for me, pack the vitality to evoke the feelings rather than just signify them.  More than mere references to the past, such memories can become priceless pieces of mental equipment, gateways to youthful emotions with which, as we age, we are in danger of losing touch.  It was a feeling of this sort – or the desire to convey such a feeling –  that must have moved Ernest Hemingway when he wrote in a letter,“If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.”  The writer’s deliberately bungled metaphor suggests a profound transgression against academic psychology.  It suggests that memory can be more than a museum-like storehouse of experience, that memory, like a ghost that takes on vividly present form, mass, and character, can be experience in and of itself.  Memory can be the toolbox of invention.  It can be imagination’s paintbrush.  But it can also be a backlight glare that casts our shadows pitch black into the future.  It can, in short bend time, not in the rather hard-to-compass sense of modern physics, but rather in the sense that a well-practiced awareness can embrace the past and draw it back to us in the present.

The pages that follow are based on these premises.

Fouschki’s Garden: Memory as Passion

Over the weeks preceding my college graduation, a predictably frequent subject of campus conversation were summer plans.  Graduation summer was special for us – a celebratory holiday in which we could spread our wings, relishing our academic success, the end of boyhood, and above all our freedom.  My own plan, which on reconsideration must have had more boyhood in it than I could then admit, involved a motorcycle tour through Europe, ending up with a sea voyage to a Greek island.  One friend, a sophomore named Dick Rand, graciously suggested that he would try to get his dad, the well-known travel writer Christopher Rand, to give me a few tips about the land of Homer.  Sure enough, when the elder Rand next visited campus, he gave me some time.  He was good enough to specify what particular island (Mykonos) I should first visit, and named Vienoula Kousathanas, “the best-known weaver in all Greece,” as my best contact.

I followed Rand’s instructions.  Five months later, on a morning when a relentless sun glorified the whitewashed buildings of Mykonos Village, I sat immobile in the brightly-appointed display room of Vienoula’s shop.  Seated facing me, occasionally glancing up as though to make sure I was still there, sat the famous weaver herself, an imposing presence, deep in thought.  This wordless seance was brought on by a simple question.  Fresh off the boat, I had found the shop, introduced myself, and asked her whether she knew of a place nearby where I could spend the next month or so.  In excellent English, she replied, “No, not offhand, but give me a moment to think,” and motioned me to a seat.  Time began expanding.  Twice over the next half hour Vienoula looked up at me and announced that she could think of nowhere, and twice I obediently rose to leave.  But each time she sternly commanded me to stay because she wasn’t done thinking yet.  Finally she straightened up in her chair, and with the barest hint of a smile suggested that I might try Fouschki’s Garden, a tiny farm with a room and a bed.  No plumbing, except for a pump under the fig tree.  But where could I ...?  “Use the pasture in back.  But watch out for the bull!”

Why do all the details of that morning survive in memory so distinctly after 56  years?  That morning, with its brilliant sun, its spotless village and its exotic events, would become the apogee of an unforgettable summer and, more than this, open up a new chapter in life itself.  I knew that something  major had clicked onto place within an hour, when I sat on my front step at  Fouschki's Garden, eating a seductively fresh fig, and the realization of a new life was burned even deeper into memory the next morning.  I had woken from a deep sleep to find the tiny, bent, figure of a man, resembling a man less than a gnarled, sawed-off branch of mesquite, standing at  the foot of my bed.  Without batting an eyelash he gestured towards the room behind him and asked "Good?" ("Kalo?").  "Kalo!  Kalo!" I thundered back, and the misshapen face burst into a radiant smile.

 For the next month, under the shade of Fouschki’s fig tree, I learned the simple life.  The neighbor ladies, who came to do their laundry at the pump, sometimes left me local treats.  The bull never approached me but, down at the then pristine beach at Plati Yialos, I was gored by a sea urchin.   The doctor who removed the painful spine was Vienoula’s daughter Anouso, a lovely young lady who was as artful a mind-gamester as her mother and reminiscent of the patron saint of all Greek weavers, Odysseus’ wife Penelope.  That week I’d been feebly romancing a British girl, and Anouso must have partaken of some village gossip, for as she probed my toe with her needle, she dramatically repeated, “Did the British girl hurt you this much?” “Did the British girl hurt you this much?” 

Who was the figure who entered and left my room so mysteriously?  Fouschi himself, I might have presumed.  But sitting in my sunny garden after my first morning on Mykonos, I  was  too blown away by the strange charm of the island to play detective.  And as the days tripped by, I let the matter slip into  memory as an unsolved mystery.  Maybe I thought it was better that way – because the anonymity of the intruder made the memory more striking.  Which leads us to a second question: what can the detailed memory of life-changing events like my 1960 arrival on Mykonos teach us about life?   One possible answer:  by suggesting the ways in which we have constructed ourselves over time, such memories can help us win our way into a kind of self-knowledge.

Memory as Theater Key

Sometimes a simple memory can become more than a mere concatenation of personal data and become the symbolic key to a whole theater of past life.  I stand in a big old redwood shed, on a ranch tucked away deep in a Mendocino forest.  Thanks to the cordiality of the owners, my family has vacationed in nearby houses on the same ranch every summer for the past twenty years.  My gaze wanders, refreshing my memory as to the shed’s familiar contents: an old kayak for travel on the lake, old fishing rods, worn-out tennis racquets, children’s life vests, the assorted detritus of summer.  I have no need of any of this equipment, but rather visit the shed each year in order to add to what you might call a time tunnel: an avenue of place and feeling that runs from the present back into the relatively distant past.

Memory as Present Chaos and Future Symmetry

I am in a memory.  Quite alone, I stand in tall grass before a close-knit grove of young redwood trees, all of them about thirty feet tall.  I’m acting as sentry for a crew that’s using a nineteen-ton cat and an inch-thick metal cable to haul another tractor of simiIar size out of a ravine.  They’ve chosen the grove of redwoods as anchor.  It’s a mid-August early afternoon, with heat already nudging 100 degrees, and I stand near the redwoods so as to catch a small amount of shade.  This proves to be a bad mistake.  There ‘s a sudden roar of diesel noise, and the cable snaps tight, cutting through the entire stand like a knife through tepid butter.  As the grove falls directly towards me, I turn and flee.  

`I trudge back down the hill and rejoin my fellow crew members, who number only two.  One is Johnny, whose family owns the big spread, and the other is Rick, who manages the lakeside ranch.  Having failed to dislodge the stranded cat, Johnny has been left with two undesirable alternatives: either quit for the day or appeal to Kenny, his older brother, who is both down with the flu and known countywide for his ferocious temper.  Although I heavily favor Alternative #1, my opinion has not been solicited.  Johnny climbs into his pickup and makes tracks for the ranch house.  After a few minutes the  pickup returns, and Kenny emerges, still in his bathrobe, snorting, wheezing, leaking snot, and cursing everything around him.  He orders Johnny and Rick to anchor their cat on a massive oak that stands near the fallen grove, and then proceeds to coax the big machine this way and that until its treads are aligned with the treads of the tractor below.  Once he hooks up with the other cat and starts to pull, both machines move easily.  His alignment has been the magic trick that made both cats do as they were told.

The only other memory I have from that day is that, when the job was done and we took a sweaty breather, Rick opened a blue plastic cooler in the back of his pickup and extracted  four cans of glacially cool Lipton Tea.  It was the most refreshing drink I’ve ever had.

This memory took on a life of its own.  But first it had to spend about a quarter-century in suspended animation.  It didn’t spring back to life until I found myself and my venerable 4x4 stuck in the mud at Jaws Beach on the island of Maui.  I aligned the front wheels with the rear wheels and escaped from the muddy Jaws, vowing not to return again.   But the memory of Kenny’s towing job wouldn’t release me.  His trick of alignment became a metaphor that applied to problem-solving in general.  I learned to consider professional problems, indeed  life’s problems in general, less as threats (though at times they were) than as invitations to compete in the game of life.   One only had to learn the rules, rules that ultimately revealed reason itself to be no more or less than an alignment between awareness and experience, a symmetry of inner with outer.  More on this in Part XI. below.

Official Accounts

One of the essential features of a fortunate childhood is a generous supply of aunts and uncles.  Of these I had six, and their visits from New York and Newark added a cushion of hugs and laughter to our family life in suburban New Jersey.  Of these my three uncles in particular shaped my early memories, because the two older ones, Mac and Terry, served as officers in World War II, while the youngest, Marty, went to New York Giants baseball games.  Uncle Mac spent the war years deciphering enemy codes for the Navy, from which he emerged into a highly lucrative, though slightly mysterious, Manhattan trade.  Radiating humor and affluence (which he advertised by buying a new Cadillac ragtop every year), he and Aunt Helen visited us often.  Equally frequent were appearances by the slightly younger Uncle Terry and Aunt Eloise.  Terry, whose Bing Crosby-ish calm had been unimpaired by a tour of duty as bombardier over Europe, brought back a short movie of the French countryside that he’d shot through his open bomb bay.  More memorably, he brought me a small metal box of K-rations, of which I at age 7 partook eagerly, though with nasty results.

But it was my youngest uncle, Marty, who provided my most indelible memory.  In my middle teens, when I was old enough to take the train from Red Bank to New York, he and I would occasionally meet in Bryant Park and ride the subway up to a huge oblong stadium called the Polo Grounds.  This had been the home of New York Giants baseball for years, though they sometimes would share it with their more celebrated intracity rivals, the Yankees.  How Marty had become a Giants fan remains a mystery.  He’d been born and raised next door to the Brooklyn Navy Yards, in a culture whose loyalty to the Dodgers verged on occult piety.  But a Giants fan he was, and passed this bizarre loyalty on to me.  During the 1950's, Giants fans had an objective reason to enthuse about their team.  That reason was a center fielder named Willie Mays, the only baseball player whom I've ever heard called the GOAT -- greatest of all time.  The team that faced the Giants that afternoon, the St. Louis Cardinals, had its own Hercules, Stan Musial.  Like Mays, Stan the Man was a phenomenon.  When he retired in 1963, he held or shared 17 major league batting records.  On this bright afternoon, a decade earlier, he was at his prime.

From our position in the bleachers behind third base, I had an excellent view of Musial's left-handed batting stance.  Unlike most batters, who planted their legs well apart, Musial held his close together, ready to kick out forward and carry more of his full weight into the swing.  Unlike most hitters, whose swings carried slightly upward to propel the ball out of the infield, he swung horizontally, to meet the pitch on its course and maximize his impact.  But on one at-bat that fine day, he would vary this strategy dramatically.  His musically-coordinated full-body swing met the pitch smoothly and squarely, launching the ball towards the center field clubhouse like a rocket into space.  I looked on in dazzlement.  The ball was still rising at 400 feet and would not begin its descent until at least 440.  In any other ballpark it would have been a home run, but center field at the Polo Grounds (though never conclusively measured) was estimated at up to 475.' Musial's drive was probably the longest at the Polo Grounds for years, but when it landed, it nested peacefully in Willie Mays's glove.  Mays, who had no equal in readiness, reflexes and speed afoot, had risen to the occasion and completed the most perfect and iconic athletic play I've ever seen.

I like to think that, in the world of the 21st century, the highest virtue is professionalism, a virtue that includes not only prolonged technical excellence but also courage and courtesy.  Whenever I call to mind that highest virtue, I think of Musial and Mays. 



Megamemory: World War II

How is character formed?  By our genes, first of all, and then by the horde of experiences that constitute our lives.  Which experiences are most formative?  Usually the most affective and longest ones, especially when they occur during our periods of rapid learning.  I was three years old, proud of walking and talking, when World War II began for the USA.  I was seven, writing simple poems and riding a two-wheeler, when it ended.  Visits from military uncles were far from being my only experiences of World War II.  In 1942, after we had moved from Rumson to Little Silver, my father was appointed fire marshal.  He came home one evening with his government-issued equipment: a helmet, a flashlight, and a formidable hardwood baton.  For my part, I insisted on donning a miniature army uniform and saluting passers-by my father’s shop on Monmouth St. at Christmas time.  These limited services made us feel closer to the war, while in fact we were closer than we realized.  The Navy Dept. hadn’t told us in Rumson and Little Silver, but we were well within range of German naval artillery between February and September of that year.

Aside from this informational cover-up, we were reasonably well-informed .  The kitchen radio, which in 1941 had brought us shocking news of the London Blitz and Pearl Harbor, relayed more encouraging tidings the next year, after decisive Allied victories at Midway and in Africa.  In particular, the morning news was instrumental in my developing vocabulary and world view.  The morning newscaster would begin each show by asserting that his sources were “official accounts,” and, because my mother’s favorite breakfast offering was sliced banana and sour cream, I would ask for “official accounts” whenever I wanted it.  Indeed “official accounts” is the first phrase that I can with any certainty remember pronouncing.

On a literary level, there is only one book that I remember studying before age eight: a gaudily-illustrated volume about enemy warplanes.  German planes in particular – Messerschmitts, Focke-Wolfs and the horrifically howling Junkers Stuka dive bombers – leapt at us in their gross ugliness from the page, and we schoolboys contemplated them with a fascinated fear.  These airborne death-dealers constituted one of my first exposures to technology – second only to my father’s Ford woody and the sculpted-plastic, art deco kitchen radio that crouched like a housecat next to the box of Cheerios.

Confined to my room with one of my frequent colds, I  would roll up old magazines and stick them between the box springs and the mattress of my bed, turning it into a crude imitation of an ancient cannon-bristling warship, like the HMS Victory or the USS Constitution.  I collected smaller plastic models of warships and sank them in the bath.

But though they are all vivid enough, these were but accidental experiences of a wartime childhood.  But memorable indeed was the fact that World War II drew me, as a diminutive and otherwise untutored innocent, into the vortex of an ethical/political dialectic.  This is because it was not an ordinary war.  It was, rather, in Studs Terkel’s words, a “good war,” a conflict of opposed political premises and moral values.  In one sense, it was a brutal referendum on the Enlightenment, whose ideas formed the basis of the modern liberal state.  Led by England, France and the United States, the Allied nations espoused Enlightenment values, including political equality, international stability, liberty, civil rights, reason, objectivity, tolerance, and representative government.  The Axis powers opposed such values, relying instead on autocracy and chauvinism.  What made one side “better” than the other and thus qualified the conflict as a good war?  The unquestionable fact that the Allies generally followed an Enlightenment code that respected the humanity of other people and other nations, while the Axis powers most assertively did not.  Thus, for the Allies, self-defense was synonymous with the defense of civilization itself.

As an otherwise witless child, I was drawn into this issue in slow stages.  First, I was outraged at the Axis powers simply because of the direct threat that they embodied.  Second, their unprovoked and brutal attacks on other nations contradicted every rule I had yet learned about civic decency.  Third – and this did not become fully apparent until the Life Magazine revelations of May, 1945 – Axis powers acted cruelly and brutally, not only towards civilians in occupied areas, but also towards their own citizens.  They were indiscriminately atrocious. Their atrocities set them beyond the traditional limits of right and wrong, exposing them to my untutored awareness as agents of transcendent evil. 

What effects did those memories have on my later life?  Few enough, with the glaring exception that, decades after August 1945, I am still fighting the Second World War.  This is because, from my admittedly debatable perspective, the Second World War has never really ended.  The forces of Enlightenment, which see politics as a means of by-consent social betterment, are still ranged against a Counter-Enlightenment that sees politics as the forcible imposition of power.  Counter-Enlightenment initiatives, moreover, come in multiple varieties:  Russia, whose policies have been characterized by expansionism and divisiveness;  dozens of smaller states that are enslaved by despotism and corruption; religion-driven states and movements where basic reason is either unknown or illegal; and the so-called United States, an Enlightenment invention that is infected by that foster-child of the Enlightenment, greed.

Thus, as it turned out, I was a lucky child: lucky to have been weaned on “official accounts” of global violence and treachery, lucky to have learned reading from the primer of inhuman atrocity.  Because of this I still carry the memory of World War II as a grim talisman.  Because of this, outrage remains a major player in my awareness. 

PART II

MEMORY AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF CHARACTER

Memory as Personal and Social Glue

Memory is the glue with which, over the years and unconsciously, we construct our personalities, and the adhesive binding together our companionships and our culture.  The people or principles that we love or distrust, the thematics of success or failure, the things we can do or are compelled to do, singly or together, perform in the theater of memory.  Memory was so crucial to ancient civilizations that epic singers cultivated it as a professional art.  The preeminence of memory then waned in stages, first with the emergence of writing, then with the invention of printing, and most recently with digital storage. Although memory remains a lively topic today, in printed books and even on the internet, we increasingly rely less on the robust process of remembering than on our technological conveniences.  Because memory is so essential in the formation of character and social cohesion, we must therefore suspect such conveniences, our smartphones and Ipads, as inconveniencing us in the practice of humanity.  How does it feel to carry your humanity in a pocket of your cargo pants and recharge it from a wall socket?  

A remarkable example of memory as an adhesive of human identity occurs late in Homer’s Odyssey.  The hero Odysseus, having returned in disguise to his kingdom of Ithaca after twenty years abroad, must prove his identity to his wife Penelope.  To this end, she gives her maid a deceptively fallacious command:

Come, Eurycleia,

move the sturdy bedstead out of our bridal chamber—

that room the master built with his own hands.

Take it out now, sturdy bed that it is,

and spread it deep with fleece,

blankets and lustrous throws to keep him warm.” 

Piqued by this request, Odysseus exclaims

Who could move my bed? Impossible task,

even for some skilled craftsman—unless a god

came down in person, quick to lend a hand,

lifted it out with ease and moved it elsewhere.

Not a man on earth, not even at peak strength,

would find it easy to prise it up and shift it, no,

a great sign, a hallmark lies in its construction.

I know, I built it myself—no one else …

There was a branching olive-tree inside our court,

grown to its full prime, the bole like a column, thickset.

Around it I built my bedroom, finished off the walls

with good tight stonework, roofed it over soundly

and added doors, hung well and snugly wedged.

Then I lopped the leafy crown of the olive,

clean-cutting the stump bare from roots up, 

planing it round with a bronze smoothing-adze—

I had the skill—I shaped it plumb to the line to make

my bedpost, bored the holes it needed with an auger.

Working from there I built my bed, start to finish,

I gave it ivory inlays, gold and silver fittings,

wove the straps across it, oxhide gleaming red.

There’s our secret sign, I tell you, our life story!

Does the bed, my lady, still stand planted firm?—

I don’t know—or has someone chopped away

that olive-trunk and hauled our bedstead off?”

-Odyssey, Book 23, trans. Robert Fagles

This reply, which as well as proving the hero’s identity and bespeaking his characteristic pride of achievement, testifies to the dominant role of memory as an adhesive in the construction of human character.  But memory is far more than this.  Odysseus’ daunting gallery of skills, from carpentry, archery, and oratory to all the other essential human arts, have all been learned by memory, which must be seen as a primary enabler and material substance of character.  One example, this time historical, should be adequate support, coming as it does from Albert Einstein’s own memory:

I saw that mathematics were divided into many specialties and each, on its own, could absorb an entire life. Consequently, I saw myself as Buridan’s ass, which was incapable of deciding between two bundles of hay. This was presumably due to the fact that my intuition in mathematics was not strong enough to clearly define what was basic… Moreover, my interest in the study of nature was no doubt stronger; and when I was a student I was still not sure that having access to in-depth knowledge of the basic principles of physics depended on the most intricate mathematical methods. I only understood this little by little, after years of independent scientific work.

-quoted by Manuel de Leon, “Mathematics and Albert Einstein,” Open Mind, 

https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/mathematics-and-albert-einstein/

Already a gifted theoretician of physics, Einstein realized that specialized forms of math would strengthen his research.  He studied great mathematicians of the past like Lobachevsky and Riemann, and went so far as to correspond with living mathematicians.  What he found useful, he committed to memory. With this support he was able to combine physics with a powerful mathematical apparatus and complete his theory of General Relativity.  Thus memory was not only the glue binding together two bodies of knowledge, but also the foundry of inspiration and the treasure-trove of the knowledge itself.

Such examples, as well as countless more that could be cited, suggest that memory is the necessary medium, not just for brilliant achievement, but for all things civilized and for survival skills themselves.  Memory is the mental soil that nurtures both present and future thought.  Nor are its harvests merely cerebral.  My wife’s uncle Ludwig von Hammerstein-Equord was a German lieutenant who joined in the 20 Juli, 1944, plot against Hitler.  When news came that the plot had failed, he had just arrested a Nazi general at the Bendlerstrasse, the sprawling Berlin staff headquarters in Berlin.  Freeing his prisoner, Ludwig escaped through a warren of passages that he remembered having played in as a child, when his father led the General Staff.  Because of this memory, he became one of the few plotters to survive the Nazi backlash that killed thousands.  

Don’t assume that I expect you to mount a plot against a deranged tyrant, though as I write in late July of 2017, I don’t consider such an event utterly impossible.  But I must suggest, nonetheless, that the full appreciation of experience requires the ability to preserve it in a mental treasury that is both accessible and interactive .  By “interactive” I mean that a well-cultivated awareness can mix and match disparate memories to create exciting parallels and tense oppositions.

There are more dramatic functions as well.  My own memory serves its normal office duties, leading me through daily tasks like making coffee or driving an electric car.  But it is also a theater of ghosts, accusing, teasing and gifting me, freezing me stiff with my past misdeeds, goading me into labors of thought, surprising me with the warmth of a long-sought hearth.  Memory, an organ that I nourish willingly, drags me unwilling into oceans of malaise and, rarely, toward an island of discovery. It is also a moral sentry. I’m not inspired to protest injustices or to resist committing them.  I’m reminded to.

The memorial glue that binds structures of individual character can also, in publicized form, bind a group, even a nation, in a common purpose.  Whether historical memories are painted in oils or coated in bronze, whether they are declaimed in speeches or sung in poetry, they are a social cement binding audiences to a presumably honorable past.  That such references may be disgracefully misused is beyond dispute.  The most respectable of them, however, are based on some demonstrable truth.  Take, for example, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:

"Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this. But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us--that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion- to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom —and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.  (italics mine)

Unlike an occasional speech, which aspires to celebrate a specific event, or a legal brief, that sways an audience to a specific decision, Lincoln’s address seeks to implant an insight firmly in the communal memory.   It performs this dramatic function in three major ways.  First, it is as brief and heavily imaged as a poem.  Lincoln uses not only biblical language (“Four score and seven”) but also evocative sexual metaphor (“our fathers brought forth,” “conceived in liberty,” “a new birth of freedom”).  Additionally,  he directs his listeners to use the past battle as a bedrock for future action (“that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain”).  Finally, he addresses memory directly and with affirmation (“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here”).  In so doing, Lincoln’s speech performs the near-magical feat of turning dead history into living memory, and uniting a live audience and many more audiences to come in the preservation of a shared moral treasure.

PART III

EBBS AND FLOWS OF MEMORY

Memory as Personal and Social Glue, continued

If memory is a key element of moral fiber, its inevitable defects profoundly endanger both individuals and the commonwealth.  Three major causes of these defects are ignorance, complacency and corruption.  Ignorance invariably leads to personal failure, except if it is enabled by privilege, imperiling whole groups.  Yet two highly-visible CEO’s have told me that they deliberately hired ignorant subordinates, in order to maintain their own executive control.  Even more dangerous than these are political operatives who plant and  fertilize ignorance by telling lies and enforcing unjust policies.  Here is Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, admitting complicity in a massive swindle:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or blacks, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Quoted by Charles M. Blow, "The Other Inconvenient Truth,"  NYT, 8/17/17

Blow goes on to note that this dishonest policy resulted in a 10-1 drug conviction ratio of blacks over whites.  Public fraud on this scale is toxic to democracy.

If ignorance results from a failure to build strong memories through precept and example, complacency is a form of forgetting – an obliviousness to the bitter lessons of the past.  Born into an age of artificial conveniences, coddled by a family of mechanical and electronic slaves, we forget the challenges that are native to the human condition: fidelity to baseline values and vigilance against malicious harm.  Basking in glory after defeating the Axis, England and America idly looked on as Josef Stalin continued his version of WW II by eating up Eastern Europe.  Years later, bouyed up by the apparent end of the Cold War, the USA dismissed Bush 43, perhaps the only person capable of leading his nation through four years of global unrest, and elected Arkansas boy wonder Bill Clinton, whose experience in global affairs was limited to Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Tennessee, Missouri, and Oklahoma.  This electoral act ushered the USA into an age of provincial complacency, which I’ve described elsewhere as “polite vulgarity,” and from which, in 2019, America has yet to recover.  

Linked with ignorance and complacency is a third defect of memory, corruption.  Here mental vacancy is colonized by a population of impulses that fall short of even being ideas, spawned as they are by want, or anger, or envy, or greed, or unspecific fear, or some rank-smelling combination of them.  These inclinations are often ingrained in youth, inherited from a bankrupt moral account that some families and groups preserve for generations.  Often, on the other hand, the cause is an individual’s self-righteous rationalization of his or her own intellectual poverty.  Sometimes this syndrome is suppressed as mute malice; sometimes it is expressed in bigotry and violence.  In rarer cases it masquerades a street wisdom, or dons the smock of some glorified philosophical poseur like Ayn Rand.A Chronicle of Childhood

My own memory has from time to time suffered from at least two of these limitations, though it is more aptly characterized by other abnormalities.  If visually expressed, this faculty would be ungainly and outsized, like a troll painted in the style of Maxfield Parrish or John Bauer.  Granted, from childhood to my grownup years, it has performed serviceably, simplifying my tasks as a writer and teacher.  But when I leave it to its own devices, it will invariably misbehave.  Sometimes it grows useless and sodden, like the Village Idiot after a massive stroke.  Sometimes it gambols and shambles, struts and staggers around my brain like a drunken dog, knocking down fences, turning over rocks, sniffing voraciously for the hidden, the forbidden, the shameful.  Disgusting things gush up from the abyss, and I have no way of turning off the spigot.  But at other times it will all but sing to me, gifting me lavishly with sweet experience freshly revived.  Perhaps this is because, since early childhood, I’ve unaccountably privileged memory over other faculties and pursuits.  At age 8, just after WWII, I used crayons in an effort to celebrate my impressions of Br’er Rabbit and Uncle Remus from Disney’s Song of the South.  At about the same time I took up a far grander project.  Finding a large blank scrapbook, I set out to record all of my elementary school years, at one page per year, writing in key information and filling empty spaces with appropriate visual impressions.

Grammar school graduation in 1952 brought an end to my involvement in the visual arts, but by late 1951 I had been able to continue my chronicle of boyhood events in a small Altamont five-year diary, bound in brown patent leather and allowing four blank lines for each day.  Sixty-six years later, sitting atop my HP computer, the little book still looks almost new.  Although ink has soaked through the pages, making them almost impossible to read, the Jan. 1, 1953, entry is still quotable:

Happy New Year.  Last night after the party S wanted to play strip poker with M and I [sic].  Can you beat that?!

-S and M being girls.  As I remember all too well, this edifying project was interrupted by the unexpected return of M’s parents.

It soon became clear that the Altamont octavo was not answering my diaristic needs.  Switching to a letter-size 150-page Standard Blank Book produced by Boorum and Pease of Brooklyn, NY, I began producing longer entries.  Writing laboriously on a daily basis, I filled four of these before my college graduation in 1960 and the ensuing year abroad.  Thanks to higher quality paper and a Parker fountain pen, the writing remains fairly clear.  Read critically, the substance of these 600 pages is both predictable and trivial – family events, test scores, sporting scores, illnesses, trips, social interactions, etc. – but things become more interesting in the later entries, when I become more aware of the transforming stylistic power of detail.  Also there are moments, even early on, when I seem to realize that only detail can convey the otherwise inexpressible quality of experience in time.  Take the entry of August 12, 1954:This rough map, so painstakingly plotted by a boy of 16, can tell us something about the complementary roles of memory, time, and space in personal development.  The little bedroom would not have been important enough for me to chart if I had not spent several years using it as my den and refuge, or if it had not contained my most precious possessions: desk, journal, Parker pen, Royal portable typewriter.  Equipped with these, the room  had opened up small oceans of time for me: private times that I could escape into and grow within.  In this room, I had slowly and without strategic planning equipped myself with the elements that would take on crucial importance to me as a writer: private space, private time, and adequate tools.  And often enough, in this accommodating four-dimensional continuum, I could occasionally forget about my agenda, lean back, and nourish my work with daydreams.

My little map was meaningful to me in another way.  Glancing at it today I realize that creating it was, in miniature but quite seriously, the building of a kind of memorial.  Just as I had earlier drawn a crayon picture depicting each of my years in elementary school, I was reifying a distinct period of my life, in a form that I could consult in the future.  Of course in producing it I was aware that years hence it would inspire memories.  But I now know that in addition such a memorial could stop time, preserving an atom of temporality in a protective and accessible frame.  A journal entry from three years later, when at 19 I’d begun my Wanderjahre, builds on this theme:

June 15, 1957.  Saturday

I am on a high hill, and a dark – – two dark brown hawks are circling over me.  It is sunny and windy; my hill has sharp slopes of field with some trees.  This is Mendocino County, California.  The nearest town is about 20 miles away; the nearest person, a mile; the ranch house is back through a great redwood forest, I am not sure by what path.  

From Mendocino to Asbury Park

Why had I brought my journal and pen on that morning walk?  Perhaps because I knew that I was about to have an experience I’d never had before – the experience of absolute solitude in nature – and I wanted to note it for future reference, the way one puts a checkmark next to a paragraph in  a book.  Reread the four declarative sentences.  Here, as throughout my teenage journals, style had no meaning for me.  The material was about as elegant as noodle soup, and the words were like so many plastic spoons for snaring and internalizing an otherwise elusive past.  I was writing for no one but my own future self, and the future memory, much more complex and vivid, that these few words could conjure up.  Just as that long gone day I used natural landmarks to find my way back to the ranch house, I now use these journal entries as road signs in a geography of time.

But events occurring later that summer were curious enough to stretch out my perspective and invigorate my reportage.  I’d returned home to Red Bank, NJ, and started trying to find work, so as to repay the money that my brothers and sister had loaned me for my trip to California.  After a week of delivering phone books, an opportunity arose on the boardwalk in Asbury Park.  An entertainment entrepreneur named Walter Reade, Jr., was putting on a Native American arts and crafts exhibition in Convention Hall, and he needed, or thought he needed, a young brave to serve as doorman at the entrance to the exhibition in the Grand Arcade.  I was found to be qualified for this modest display of showmanship, which consisted, at most, of standing still and returning greetings all day, sometimes from well over a thousand strollers-by.  By far the two most popular conversation-starters concerned my biological and ethnic identity.  Was I a real person or just a borrowed tobacconist’s wooden Indian?  Was I a real Indian or did I look, as one lady asserted, “too American to be one”?  But most of the time I stood still and silent, trying gamely to blend with the garish background.  In this posture I tried to be all cattle and no hat – completely insignificant but ferociously observant.   I had had a similar feeling atop the hill in Mendocino: the feeling that I must impoverish myself of all affect in order to garnish the wealth of experience.  It was a kind of aggressive meditation, and it produced powerful memories.

My tenure as a brave was brief but eventful.  I would spend my work days seemingly in suspended animation, but actually in furtive admiration of a blond girl named Josephine, who sold taffy across the arcade from me.  Thus, without knowing it at the time, I was living out Hank Williams’/Fred Rose’s song, “Kaw-Liga,” (1952), which went 

Kaw-Liga was a wooden Indian standing by the door.

He fell in love with an Indian maiden over in the antique store. 

Kaw-liga just stood there and never let it show, 

So she could never answer "yes" or "no."

I got to know a family group of natives and pseudo-natives who ran a booth in the Hall, and we all spent a couple of beery evenings near my dad’s tomato garden at our home in Red Bank.  But my most unforgettable encounter was with an enigmatic figure, ten years or so my senior, who had taken the name of a famous Sioux chief of yesteryear.  Here I’ll emend my journal entry to name him “JWC:”

July 22, 1957.  Monday

........I had met a Chief JWC of the Sioux, a very strange young man who speaks many languages, went to school in Israel, and, if what he says is true, is also a lama and a Paiute priest.  He is the nephew of a lady who works upstairs; we first met last weekend and since then have talked a few times.  Sunday I was sitting on the beach after lunch when JWC approached, drew barehanded a Thunderbird in the sand, and said that he had found me from a quarter-mile away, by literally sniffing me out.  And this: He has had two visions about me.  If he has a third, he will have to make me his brother and adopt me into his Dakotan tribe as a chief and his successor.  I shall become an Indian at a rite for which his tribesmen will come to Cambridge.  I will receive a complete wardrobe and be taught all Indian ways and all ways of leading a tribe.  I shall at times spend half my year on the reservation..... My protestations, as humble as they could be in the burning heat of the beach and my surprise, only made him think me more fit to be an Indian, but he said that if I pleased, I should only become an honorary chief.  

My mood over the next few days declined from one of mild excitement to one of deep perplexity tinged by terror.  Was the Chief’s proposal genuine and, if genuine, sane?  My many daydreams and projections into the future did not include spending half my life in the Dakotas.  Most importantly, I wished to decide my own future for better or worse, rather than be steered and driven down some narrow course by some extremist.  As it turned out, things were at once complicated and simplified for me a few days later.  I was standing at attention at my usual post in the Grand Arcade, probably gazing distractedly at the Taffy Shop across the way, when something large and bulky interposed itself between me and the object of my attention.  It was Walter Reade, Jr., himself, resplendent in a linen blazer and impressively aromatic with Old Spice.  After a few brief niceties, Reade announced that the wooden Indian position was being eliminated and that I was being promoted to chief usher at the nearby Mayfair Theater (see Illus). 

That night I reviewed my position and decided that if the offer of one chieftainship was profoundly disconcerting, the offer of two was an abomination before God.   On the other hand, if I were to cut and run, WR, Jr., could easily find another usher, and Chief JWC, gifted though he might be, would not be able to smell me out ten miles away in Red Bank, NJ.

After hasty goodbyes to my friends at Convention Hall, I proceeded to vanish from the scene.  It was not the first time, nor would be the last, that I would salvage my future by a sensible and well-executed display of cowardice.

What can we make of these events?  In terms of history, very little.  Convention Hall remains an Asbury Park landmark.  The Mayfair Theater was torn down in 1974, having outlived its owner by about a year.  Walter Reade, Jr., built his inherited business into a conglomerate empire, profiting especially by the major success of George A. Romero’s epoch-making Night of the living Dead.  While enjoying the fruits of his labors, Reade died in a skiing accident near St. Moritz in 1973.  I never saw him, nor Chief JWC, nor any of the others after leaving the Grand Arcade in 1957.  In terms of the preservation of memory, however, the semi-comic episodes of that summer take on more substance, if only because of my journal entries.  My Mendocino memoir of June 15 is stylistically curt and impressionistic, faithful to my fundamentally careless style of earlier years.  The excerpt from July 22, on the other hand, is comparatively detailed.  What had changed over the intervening month?  I must have realized that past events could be preserved only by the burdensome task of detail – that conclusions are empty and characterizations forgettable, without the subtly forceful minutiae of experience.

But regular journal-keeping has been helpful to me in other ways as well.  In 1980 I bought a small blank book and began entering, in one-line form, the important events of each day.  These entries generally concerned things I had to or felt I had to do: work and exercise; but they occasionally included other events, like travel and illness.  I continued this practice faithfully for 25 years.  What good is this journal?  Right now, no good at all. It’s ugly and illegible, lying splayed out in my copier like a cartoon character who’s just been hit by a falling safe.  But over its many years of use, it served as a moral watchdog, reminding me of what I owed my students, my family, and myself.

 

Daily journal, 1980-2005

About a year before this I had started a completely different journal – one that could serve as a kind of skunkworks or laboratory of ideas for a book that I was working on.  I’ve discussed this writing aid elsewhere.  Here anyway is a brief example of its function:

April 14, 1990

10:40 AM, brilliant Saturday morning, Eugene, Oregon, the past few days looking like late May or June, except for the many empty blossomed or green-fuzzed limbs.  Air almost soupy with pollen, driving many colleagues mad.  In my office, 372 PLC, U of Oregon, my writing-place of many years, since the middle 70s, when it became action-central for a book on Shakespeare, down through the record streak of rejections on the time book, and then a pathological burst of writing, 1985-89, catalysed by the appearance of a word-processor.  In 1989 this pace slowed down to nickle-and-dime work on articles, revisions on The Grace of Great Things and other small items.  I felt that I needed rest.  I was depressed by four months last year that included a car crash, my son Teddy's pneumonia and the death of my Aunt Ruth.  The whole idea of rest, symbolized during the rainy winter by the simple image of stretching out somewhere warm in the daytime and going to sleep, was always somewhere in my mind, and I was unsure whether I would ever want the strain of writing a full-length book again.  Still am.

But if I do, it may be a novel like this:  I want to expand on the consequences of a creative act.  The fictional act will be a book written by a college professor, so there will be an autobiographical component.  The "Book" will be a creative act in two ways: 1) because books often are, 2) because our professor's book will be iconoclastic and direct in ways that most books aren't.  Bk will meet with stock responses and kooky responses;  the latter will power the plot.  

The book's title:  Book.

 This brief personal memoir helped me in two ways: it frankly recorded my state of mind at a moment in life, and it made that moment important by inciting me to begin a long work of fiction.  Thus the journal created a moment of self-awareness, a blunt ledger of plus and minus, from which I could draw the gumption and pure badness to begin a long satiric treatment of a topic that was close to my own personal experience.  Journal-keeping also strengthened my memory, because every time I recorded a new event or idea, I confirmed it more strongly in my awareness.  And by opening up a new and distinct narrative, I diversified and thus renewed myself.

Ignoring and Forgetting

If the plague of youth is that of being ignored, the plague of old age is that of being forgotten.  This is because, both in youth and in old age, we are barred from the playing-field of society, where individuals from young adulthood to late middle age exercise their skills, take their risks, pick up their paychecks, and, most importantly, engage each other.  On the other hand, the people in this very playing-field – the nerve-center of culture – fall vulnerable to two even greater plagues:  ignoring and forgetting.  These movers and shakers, first-teamers and wannabees, intent on their next move or quarterly total, may carelessly abjure, even despise, the boundless  curiosity and aspiration of youth, as well as the rich and sober balance of memory.  To do so is to exile oneself from life’s continuity and broad range of alternatives.

Thus every period of social life carries its own form of natural deprivation, which can be mitigated only by rare accessions of inspiration or purposefully followed acts of will.  As a retiree of many years, I’m subject to two of these deprivations, but I struggle against them.  I try to enhance my aspiration and memory, by researching and writing books and seeking to publish them, just as I did at age 30.  And so far as being forgotten is concerned, I may miss the lost flood of queries, invitations, and fan letters, but I stealthily appreciate the solitude and freedom that this loss provides.  That’s because of a lifelong fracture between sociability and solitude, crowd and cloud.  In 1957, posing as a wooden Indian in the Grand Arcade, I relished not only the crowds passing around me but also the fact that, by taking me for a piece of cheap statuary, many of them would completely ignore me.  A few years later, motorcycling alone along empty roads in Europe, I could not separate the pleasure of my lonely trip from anticipation for the meetings that it would lead to.  And in all this I was fully conscious of building memories, colorful actions in which, as-yet-unknown, a quiet theater would grow, endowed with forms of humble wealth that, if faithfully cultivated, would last me indefinitely.

Maintaining Memory

It’s well known that the multifarious conscious brain-functions – imagining, computing, remembering, reasoning, communicating, etc. – tend to slow down with age and can best be maintained by constant exercise.  Of these, perhaps the most crucial function is memory, if only because it plays a key role in all the others.  Long-term memory and short-term memory have been traced to two different areas of the brain and found to be two different structures.  Long-term memory consists of neural connections formed in the hippocampus, while short-term memory is stored as chemicals in the frontal lobe.  This structural difference would seem to explain why, as we age, short-term memories are more perishable and thus more easily confused or lost.  The question of whether a given experience is lost or preserved depends on the degree of its emotional resonance or on the degree of importance that we assign to it.  

Another category of distinctions concerns the relative importance that we assign to memory itself.  Up to now I’ve advanced the premise that our access to memory, far from being a withdrawal from a passive piggy bank of data, is participation in an active thought process that demands keen attention and well-practiced skills.  On later pages I hope to dwell on the importance of memory in areas of political dialogue and debate.  But for now, let’s look at uses that are more narrowly personal:

I spent my entire salaried career instructing college students about the works of William Shakespeare.  Because I loved the material and valued my students’ attention, my job was almost sinfully easy.  Within a year or so, the comments I’d jotted into my thick Riverside edition made course preparation unnecessary.  I more or less made Shakespeare teach himself, and after ten more years my aging Riverside had grown so worn and pliant that I took to using it as a pillow for naps.  But as the years passed, and my area of responsibilities broadened, my memory, like some jaded and  overloaded donkey, began to protest.  I won’t bore you with a list of my forgettings, except to insist that at least three of them were unforgettable.  As a kind of damage control, I began formulating my own memory drills.  I remember distinctly climbing into my shower one day and standing forever under the hot spray, trying to remember the surnames of NBA centers from A to Z (Lou Alcindor and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar work equally well as openers).  Although this drill had near-zero direct connection with my personal or professional priorities, it had a perceptible toning effect on my day-to-day awareness.  Over the months and years that followed, I spread the field, basing new drills in other subject areas, including NFL quarterbacks, rivers, lakes, nations, towns in familiar states, male movie stars, female movie stars (remember the Zimbalists and the Kinskis), classical composers, soldiers, tennis champs, poets, philosophers, big-league sluggers, and mountain peaks.  I still practice these odd drills.  Though philosophically almost completely irrelevant, they have the meta-philosophical value of helping to preserve mental fitness.

It is as though the very act of remembering were  powered by a muscle that could preserve its strength only by regular exercise.  Taken for granted or otherwise neglected, memory can corrupt and fester like an abscess.  It can become the cradle of injustice and the nest of scorn.   But faithfully cherished and maintained, it can broaden human scope and supercharge human character.

Preserving Moral and Social Memory

A similar principle applies to moral and social memory.  For better or worse, the foundational structure of a culture depends in some measure on its prevailing image of the past.  Earlier I’ve discussed the moral role of memory as well as Abraham Lincoln’s effort at Gettysburg to awaken a body of shared political memory.  These considerations tempt a critical question: If morality is seated in memory, and memory needs constant exercise and renewal, how can this process be implemented in popular culture?

We are experiencing the implications of this question in the early 21st century.  The plague of societies founded, like ours, on liberty and reason, is that, without the support of reason, liberty  falls easy prey to the manipulations of would-be tyrants. But Libertas, that most guileless of maidens, feels that she can desert reason whenever the mood strikes her, often preferring such wily suitors as wealth, religion, bigotry and power. Excessive attention to any of these suitors robs liberty of its strength. And nations bereft of both reason and liberty are the unhappiest places on earth.

From these well-known issues we may provisionally conclude that nations whose existence depends on reason – rational inquiry, rational debate, and informed choice – must make civic education their dominant priority.  This education, moreover, should stress a kind of social memory: a history of the autocratic societies, the monarchic and religious power structures, from which representative government emerged in the 18th century, and which, in slightly altered form, menace them even today.

These autocratic cultures, in general, tend to have warped political memories.  Russia, for example, has been an autocracy of one sort or another ever since it became a nation.  Islam, with few exceptions, has carried the burden of paralytic religious law for over a millennium.  China and Japan have stood aloof from the chief messages of the Enlightenment: the rule of reason, human equality, and legal checks and balances.  Autocrats of such states don’t have to worry about revolts by citizens who wish to recover their lost freedoms, precisely because they never had freedoms to lose.  All that such governments have to do, in order to preserve their power, is control behavior and information flow brutally and cruelly.  Rational government, on the other hand, burns itself into the memory of its citizens.  As Nicolò Machiavelli warns his prince,

But in republics [i.e., governments based on popular will] there is greater life, greater hatred, and more desire for vengeance; they do not and cannot cast aside the memory of their ancient liberty, so that the surest way is either to destroy them or reside in them. 

The Prince, trans. Luigi Ricci, Ch. 5

We Americans, in 2019, still have some of our “ancient liberty.”  But it must be admitted that much of that liberty has gradually, through legislation, court decisions and executive orders,  passed from the citizenry to moneyed corporations and individuals.  The agents of this injustice have been greed and self-interest, abetted by a gross popular ignorance and forgetfulness of the simple connections between cause and effect.  People do not understand, or remember, that the extreme claims and blanket promises of a political candidate are always false, and that believing such claims and promises is always disastrous.  People do not understand, or remember, that a government’s injustice towards our fellow citizens is always an injustice towards ourselves.  People do not understand, or remember, that nations are no stronger than their weakest link, and that in the case of the USA, our weakest link is ignorance: ignorance of who we are, how we came to be, and, most of all, what we have to lose.  They do not understand, or remember, that the keystone of liberty lies in preserving and defending, the laws that make us free.

The current executive administration in DC, headed up by a sceptered mountebank named Donald Trump, reminds us that the history of religion and the history of tyranny have one rhetorical lesson in common:  that the first step in subverting the common will is imposing belief in the unbelievable.  This subversion is not achieved by a single lie.  It demands a veritable multitude of lies, repeated regularly and bassooned into the public ear as loudly as possible – so often and so loudly that criminal absurdity hypnotizes the citizenry, taking firm root in the common memory.  Columnist Frank Bruni ironically invokes this phenomenon when comparing the current White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to her predecessor, Sean Spicer:

Sanders doesn’t draw nearly the censure or ridicule that Spicer did, and the reason isn’t her (sic). It’s us. More precisely, it’s what Trump and his presidency have done to us. Little more than nine months in, we’ve surrendered any expectation of honesty. We’re inured.

Veteran columnists like Bruni do more than critique an isolated injustice.  They remind us that our nation was founded and maintained by respect for truth.



PART IV

CREATIVE MEMORY

Memory and Imagination

On the face of things, memory and imagination may seem to be innately different brain functions, but recent psychological research suggests that the two processes are physically and functionally connected.  Personally I am fascinatedby interactions between memory and imagination that are historically documented and can be described in relatively simple language: the philosophical and artistic initiatives of brilliant minds.  Three dramatic examples spring to mind, respectively from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries:

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), known as the founding theorist of modern science, was gifted equally as a critical analyst and creator of vivid literary images.  He was also a well of learning, both ancient and modern, a kind of living library with the ability to combine the ideas of others into striking new syntheses.  A self-proclaimed innovator, he nonetheless drew from sources as ancient as Plato and Aristotle.   He was a subtle critic of religion, yet knew his Bible well.  In his highly influential Novum Organum, he achieves as masterful stroke of philosophical rhetoric by characterizing the foibles of traditional scientific method in terms of the biblical bete noir, “idolatry:” Idols of the Tribe, Idols of the Cave, Idols of the Marketplace, and Idols of the Theater.  Thus he combines memory with imagination to invest his own new concepts with ancient moral force.  

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-91) introduced his great Mass in C Minor for performance in his home town of Salzburg, Austria in October of 1783.  He assigned the part of first soprano to his new wife, Constanze, who sang the famous aria, Et incarnatus est.  Here the term “aria” is rather dramatic, because arias were general composed, not for Masses, but rather for operas.  Mozart, who had already produced 13 operas by this time, was boldly introducing a decidedly secular style into a religious service.  Given the melodic sensuality, the soprano sings of Christ as though he was her lover.  The fact that Mozart reserved the part for his new wife adds another level of complication to this coincidence of the sacred with the erotic.  Here he was using his secular mnemonics for a dizzying if ambiguous stroke of religious expression.  This was Mozart as his most Mozartian.  In fact, two of his most prodigious and closely-linked talents were memory and imagination.  One of the best-known stories in musicological lore concerns his visit to Rome in 1770 with his father, Leopold.  At the Vatican, the two attended a performance of a Miserere composed in 1638 by a cleric named Gregorio Allegri.  This work was so treasured by the Church that it was seen in itself as a sacred object:  papal authority forbade anyone to copy it.  Not only sacred but also sizable, the piece took almost 15 minutes to perform.  Both Mozarts were touched by its beauty, and when Leopold later bemoaned its fabled unavailability, his 14-year-old son responded that the Miserere was no longer unavailable. He had memorized it at first hearing.. Mozart committed the work to paper, thus, in effect, preserving it for the world of music.  Yet prodigious memory was only one part of his astonishing musical consciousness.  He claimed to be able to hold a completely new composition, be it sonata or symphony, in his mind in a single moment, and was an acclaimed improvisor.  Memory was an important element in his improvisation because it afforded the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmical pathways that can lead from one tonal statement to another.

Memory, technically defined, is data stored in chemicals or neural structures in the brain.  Less technically defined, it is the living residue of personal, experience.  As such it can be expressed, published, and monetized.  Our third anecdote, this time from 1893, has John Galsworthy pinching narrative elements from Joseph Conrad’s “fund of yarns” – memories acquired during 19 years of maritime experience -- after the two had met aboard the clipper ship Torrens, where Conrad was serving as first mate.  Galsworthy proved true to his word by using some of Conrad’s yarns in his early fiction.  Conrad is said to have returned the compliment by basing his signature fictional character, Marlow, on Galsworthy’s traveling companion, Ted Sanderson.  A more comprehensive effort to produce and retail memory had been made in 1879 by a writer whom Galsworthy and Sanderson both admired, Robert Lewis Stevenson.  Hoping to kick off a profitable writing career at age 29, Stevenson trekked for 120 miles in the near-wilderness of south-central France, accompanied only by a donkey named Modestine.  His memoir of this journey, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes, was both successful and influential, not only on travel literature, but also on trekking per se.  What distinguishes it from other travel books is a kind of raw authenticity: the personal discomfort, geographical confusion, and cultural disparity experienced by someone alone and meagerly equipped in a strange land.  Add to this the writer’s detailed narrative of his rocky relationship with Modestine, and you have something with the tang and bite of directly felt experience.  But there are also, as though to complete the direct literary personality, glimpses of romantic youthfulness, like this impression of a night in the woods:

A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chasserades and the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theatres and pass-keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more serene possession of myself, nor felt more independent of material aids. The outer world, from which we cower into our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and night after night a man’s bed, it seemed, was laid and waiting for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house. I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are revealed to savages and hid from political economists: at the least, I had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves is of all lives the most complete and free. (“A Night among the Pines”)

Frontispiece by Walter Crane: R.L. Srevenson,  Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes

Edition of London, 1907Memory and Imagination, continued

When star James Cagney and director H.C. Potter were wrapping up production of their boisterous comedy, The Time of Your Life (1948), they ran into a daunting and unexpected roadblock: the Production Code Administration would not accept the film’s ending, in which the Falstaffian clown, Kit Carson, rears up and shoots to death the down-and-dirty villain, Freddie Blick.  Searching for the best possible way out of this imbroglio, Cagney’s team hit on a wholly Falstaffian solution straight from Shakespeare’s text of Henry IV, Part One, where Falstaff tries to take credit for Prince Hal’s triumph over Hotspur.  Here Cagney’s character, Joe, conquers the villain bloodlessly, but Carson tries to take the credit. 

Who was responsible for this inspired theft?  We lack a positive identification, though the most likely suspects are Potter and Cagney themselves.  What interests me here is that dramatic imagination, when faced with a daunting challenge, turned to memory for assistance.  Examples of this interaction are legion.  The whole stretch of literary tradition partakes of it.  Shakespeare himself ranks high in the phalanx of artists who availed themselves of other artists’ words and techniques.  To appreciate the interaction of memory and imagination, we might visualize the creative mind as a kind of workshop, filled not only with the hardware for producing new work, but also a shelved museum-like inventory of completed artifacts, available for renewal and incorporation in the project at hand.  More accurately, perhaps, one may reconsider memory as a garden of imagination.  Imagination as Memory 

The Leopard, a 1960 novel by Guiseppe di Lampedusa, recounts a series of scenes from the life of Fabrizio di Salina, a fictional 19th-century Sicilian prince, set against a background of the Risorgimento, a political and social upheaval culminating in the reunification of Italy and the end of a quasi-feudal old social order.  On another level, the novel is also a meditation on the Past – about human interactions that have slipped, or are slipping, from realities into the realm of memory.  This meditative level becomes emphatic in the final chapter, which describes events that occur in Fabrizio’s palazzo, twenty-two years after his death.  Concetta, Fabrizio’s daughter, now old herself, surveys one of the palazzo’s long-neglected rooms:

To one who knew the facts — Concetta herself — it was an inferno of mummified memories. The four green cases contained dozens of day and night shirts, dressing-gowns, pillow-cases, sheets ''carefully divided into “ best ” and “second-best”: the trousseau collected by Concetta herself fifty years before. Now those padlocks were never opened for fear incongruous demons might leap out, and under the ubiquitous Palermo damp the contents grew yellow and decayed, useless for ever and for anyone. The portraits were of dead people no longer loved, the photographs of friends who had hurt her in their lifetime, the only reason they were not forgotten in death; the water-colours showed houses and places most of which had been sold, or rather stupidly bartered way by spendthrift nephews. Anyone looking carefully into the heap of moth-eaten fur would have noticed two erect ears, a snout of black wood, and two astonished eyes of yellow glass; it was Bendicò, dead for forty-five years, embalmed for forty-five years, nest now of spiders’ webs and moths, detested by the servants who had been imploring Concetta for dozens of years to have it thrown on the rubbish heap; but she always refused,,reluctant to detach herself from the only memory of her past which aroused no distressing sensations. [p. 305]

Bendicò, a great dane, had been a beloved member of the princely household.  Now long-deceased, his stuffed effigy had fallen prey to time.  Depressed by the sight, indeed drained of emotion, Concetta orders his remains to be thrown out the window and down into a courtyard.  The novel’s final paragraph commemorate4s this final fall from grace:

As the carcass was dragged off, the glass eyes stared at her with the humble reproach of things that are thrown away, that are being annulled.  A few minutes later what remained of Bendicò was flung into a corner of the courtyard visited every day by the dustman.  During the flight down from the window his form recomposed itself for an instant; in the air one could have seen damning a quadruped with long whiskers, and its right foreleg seemed to be raised in imprecation.  Then all found peace in a heap of livid dust. [p. 320]

Bendicò, whose imposing presence has endured since the novel’s opening page, is in these late passages transposed into a Russian doll of symbolic meanings.  In the first excerpt, he symbolizes the princely Salina culture of the past, now moth-eaten, evanescent and despised.  In the second, as he is dragged to the window and thrown away, he represents memory itself, that endows things past with life and moral tone (“his form recomposed itself,” “damning,” “imprecation”).  And thirdly, as the whole work concludes with this uncanny image, we can look at Bendicò as an avatar of the novel itself: a literary evocation of past time, produced organically by a creator whose own existence was being consumed by time.  Indeed Giuseppe di Lampedusa, who saw The Leopard  rejected by the two biggest presses in Italy, did not live to see his book in print.

Recovering the Past

If The Leopard intimates that the subjects of memory are evanescent and irrecoverable, Martin Scorsese’s formidable film, Hugo, replies that we may keep touch with the past by engagement with what is memorable, and with the people, living or dead, who made it so. While Lampedusa’s take on the past is gently elegiac, Scorsese redemptively blends the past into the immediacy and urgency of life as lived.  He does so by enriching the story of a boy, who recovers a coded message from his dead father and restores the life of a depressed and long-forgotten artist by reassembling an automaton, with emotional elements characteristic of classic romance:  recovery, recognition, regeneration, restitution, restoration, and even resurrection. If The Leopard intimates that the subjects of memory are evanescent and irrecoverable, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, replies that we may keep touch with the past by engagement with what is memorable, and with the people, living or dead, who made it so.

To convey his message, Scorsese employs multiple strategies.   First he and screenwriter John Logan treat their immediate source material, Brian Selznick’s novel, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, with near religious respect.  Selznick has told of an abandoned boy, compelled to eke out a larcenous existence in a Paris railway station, whose quest to decode an enigmatic message from his father leads him to a series of surprising discoveries, including the rediscovery of a long-forgotten film-maker (Ben Kingsley).  Second, Scorsese takes this already-powerful material and further ignites it with compelling 3-D camera work, enchanting music (-Howard Shore),  a bevy of delightful characterizations, great scene design, and near-perfect pacing.  This combination of expressive strengths earned 11 Oscar nominations leading to five wins.)  Third, Scorsese and Logan focus on certain aspects of their narrative in order to create a symbolic, near allegorical emotional logic.   They erect a classically romantic structure in which the traditional sentiments of romance –  recovery, recognition, redemption, regeneration, restitution, restoration, return, reconciliation, and even resurrection – work unanimously to focus audience attention on the dangers and promises of time: the fact that the passing of time can damage or enrich human enterprise.  Additionally , they bring iconic resonance to three technological presences that have evolved through the Victorian past and into the early decades of the 20th century, (when the film is set): The robot (“automaton”), the railroad train, and the movie.  From these presences we learn how time has flowed from our prememorial past, through our lives and towards a postmemorial future; and how our own curiosity and ingenuity, realized forcefully in the character of young Hugo (Asa Butterfield) can lead us both to redeem the past and to pioneer the future.

Finally, the fact that one of his thematic topics was itself the cinema gave Scorsese not only a chance to add a witty and enthralling dimension to his opus but also a unique opportunity to celebrate his own metier.    Hugo not only abounds in amusing cinematic innovations but also enshrines the work of  the historical figure who stands at the goal of Hugo’s search: Georges Méliès (1861-1938).   Méliès, who was making movies as early as 1896, immediately saw film not just as an imaginative illusion of reality, but also as an enshrinement of imagination itself.  As performing magician, he turned quickly to visual magic, using multiple exposure and other coups de theatre that amazed and delighted.  Scorsese’s tribute to him in Hugo is in part an evocation of his exuberant style.

With all this said and done, we might look momentarily for connections between Martin Scorsese\ and Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in the web of modern esthetic history.  Though they don’t constitute a smoking gun of artistic influence, such connections add up to the next best thing.  Both the Scorseses and the Tomasis traced back to Palermo, Sicily.  Both Giuseppe and Martin were sickly children and experienced pain and social exclusion.  Both, moreover, felt deeply uncomfortable about the past.  Martin resisted visiting Sicily early on, because he was afraid that its cultural gravity would trap him forever.  Giuseppe, a hereditary prince, lost his home to bombs in WW2.  Late in life, he would compose The Leopard in and avowed effort to memorialize his background and its loss.  Martin saw Luchino Visconti’s movie version of The Leopard in 1963 and immediately fell in love with it.  He has stated that "I live with this movie every day of my life," and in 2010 he lavishly restored the original print and screened it to a wowed audience at Cannes.



Aside:

During this week of writing (November 11-18, 2017) my studies and expressive challenges have opened up more in my head than I can easily handle: ideas for expansion, new chapter topics, and particularly memories – vignettes from the past that are as frequently torturesome as they are pleasant.  In particular, I remember the mercilessly unappealing taste of raw potato that I scrounged out of a stuttering fire during a frigid night my fellow Boy Scouts and I were spending outdoors near our scoutmaster’s house in the hills.  After 70 years of welcome oblivion, the name of our bungling scoutmaster, Evenson, needles me just above the ear.  Less painfully, I remember my parents, whose own youthful idolization of writers like Twain, London, and Stevenson, apparent in their crowded bookshelves, took me by storm as a teenager.  And I suddenly realized that writing about memory with any degree of honesty opens you up, making you vulnerable not only to the world you have created but also to the world that has created you.



PART V

ECCENTRICITIES

Private Eternities

Coexistentent and codependent with memories of specific ideas and events are larger areas of memory that provide a context for them.  School years, college years, years in a profession, years of retirement behave geographically, like states into which we divide the continent that is our past.  For me, these larger temporal areas were like private eternities, because I got so viscerally involved in them that each seemed an encircling and boundless temporal environment.  These environments were so emotionally enthralling, so deeply branded, that the transition from one to the next could take on existential luster.  My first morning under the fig tree on Mykonos, the explosive zest of my first tangerine on Maui, symbolize in memory the sense of being born into new worlds, new states of mind, new avenues of time.

This is because each of my private eternities, from toddling up to the present, established its own existential geography.  The years from kindergarten through 8th grade, all spent in the same building with the same teachers and classmates, established for me a world unto itself, a world boldly distinct from what preceded it, a world that, once past, I could no more return to than Aeneas could return to his vanished Troy.  These eternities differed sharply from each other in tone and purpose, nonetheless shared one element in common: the inescapable and irreplaceable human consciousness of responsibility towards others.  That sense of my integration with others could turn a set period of time into a prison or a haven.  It all depended on what I made of it.

For me as for most other workers, the most extensive of private eternities was the 25+ central years during which I pursued a career and helped raise a family.  It was during these years that I most fully experienced the “integration with others” that I’ve just mentioned: a set of miscellaneous interactions involving obligations, problem-solving, leadership, courtesy, care-giving, multi-level communications, and the balancing of multiple perspectives.  In facing the challenges of the professional world, I pursued a time-strategy that other researchers might find useful: I concentrated my contact-hours and kept them as brief as possible, thus opening lengthier periods for the generation and communication of ideas.  In my choice of specialization, I established a similar economy: instead of easily-accessible subject areas, I chose the most challenging field possible and invested in it heavily in terms of terms of time and concentration.  This is the sort of  emotional investment that Freud  famously called Besetzung and others have called cathexis.  This sort of investment – this projection of personality into an abstract sphere -- ultimately enabled me to discuss complex issues as though they were familiar items, and also provided me with a treasury of anecdotes, quips and paradoxes to decorate and burnish the passages or ideas under study.  Using these strategies and others like them, I was able to navigate a near-normal course through the mad avenues of academe and the disaster epic constantly threatened by three small boys.

Memory as an Athletic Pursuit

It is unlikely that the International Olympic Committee will ever designate remembering as a medal-bearing event, but this idea is less absurd than it may sound.  For memory, an essential factor in everything we say or do, consists not only of mental data but also on the means by which such data are hunted down, grabbed, and brought to consciousness.  Examining these means – call them the athletics of memory – can yield surprising results.  In the first place, they are radically multifarious.  The variety of our hooks and grapples for recovering mental data almost equals in scope the variety of actions of the mind, both conscious and unconscious.  That is because our memories are wired to record, willy-nilly, anything that we think or dream.  

But of course we don’t remember everything.  Even experiences that seem very important – a number, a sunset, a kiss – can slip away from us, displaced by other events or starved by distraction.  To be held clearly in memory, important experience must be brought regularly and frequently to consciousness and reviewed in detail.  Reengaged in this way, past experience can become a ready resource, a toolbox for dealing with contingencies present and future.  It can also kindle a new appreciation for experience in general a respect and affection for the continuity flowing through us from the past and into the future.  This sense of the continuum can be a positive factor in the development of personal integrity.

We must preserve this continuum in the face of stern challenges.  Aging, which diminishes the whole physique, does not overlook our memories in its quietly destructive course.  Earlier I’ve mentioned memory games as a means of resisting this downward curve, but medical literature suggests that physical exercise as well can support mental fitness.  And you might do well to balance these exertions of body and mind by cultivating a civilized laziness.  Lazy time is recuperative, but it can be much more.  Sometimes, when I am relaxed and contemplative, a hidden gate swings open, and memories quietly filter in.

Who are the winners in the memory Olympics?  A common component of excellent performance is love.  To those who practice it well, memory is a love affair with experience, a time-halting intimacy with life as lived.  Whether or not one loves a given memory for itself, one relishes the art of giving it shape, preserving it, and conveying it to others.  Look again at young Mozart’s response to the performance of Allegri’s Miserere.  Even though he had not written it himself, he invested himself in it and allowed it to possess him.  He gave himself, totally and often very swiftly, to the musical shapes that floated in his imagination. This shaping love, a spirit that is playful, penetrating, and seductive, asserts itself in all of his most significant compositions.  

Threshold Memories

Concealed behind all the easily available details of one’s personal  past – common words, familiar faces, local geography, current events – lies a tricky area, crowded with items that are impossible to retrieve easily.  You might call these “threshold memories,” for they seem to stand in the doorway between consciousness and oblivion.  They’re like blank patches on an old snapshot, haunting us with their strange combination of presence and vacancy.   I enjoy trying to sort out these psychological puzzles, because of the great variety of mental tools that can be used in and sharpened recovering the misplaced memories.

I’ve managed to nab a few threshold memories recently, and each time the capture required a different approach.  In one case, I couldn’t remember a man’s  name , but I did remember that both the first and last name were accented on the first syllable.  I decided to build on this suggestive prompt, and immediately was gifted with the idea that both first and last names ended with the same letter, an N. After these two hints, the correct name all but shouted to me.  Like words that emerge when you fence them in with others on a crossword puzzle, the name became available to me after I’d hypothesized on the basis of two small clues.  A few days later, I sought the name of a Renaissance artist.  I threw a bunch of well-known names of other Renaissance artists at him, and he agreed to identify himself.  In a third case, I was blocking on the name of an old Continental art form.  Temporarily discouraged by the task, I headed for the kitchen, made a cup of tea, and took it into the living room.  As I sat in an easy chair, sipping tea, an internal screen popped briefly into my mind’s eye, with the correct name printed on it.

From these examples and others, I can provisionally conclude that the retrieval of memory is a pragmatic exercise, allowing for multiple procedures and tools, and that conscious efforts at retrieval can be assisted by subconscious suggestions.  In short, nothing is sacred, or forbidden, in the investigative actions of mind, and undertaking them with a will can bring surprising rewards.

I have another sort of threshold memories.  These are silent, diffident, but fully formed narratives that conceal themselves from my awareness just as a troop of elves might hide behind a doorway to some generally disregarded room of the past, revealing themselves only during those rare moments when I enter it.  A number of these concern surprising discoveries or sudden emergencies that, once survived, are gradually relegated to the back shelves of personal history.  One such  incident occurred shortly after my arrival at Trinity College, Dublin, in the fall of 1960, during the compulsory first interview with my tutor, Philip Edwards.  This Edwards, a Brit who over several decades would become a lion of Shakespearean studies, was at that point in time an affable, well-tweeded young don who, in the British fashion, carried a smoking briar pipe between clenched teeth.  I marveled at his capacity to do this, even in the process of making an emphatic academic point, but my marvel turned to terror when, in the middle of a sentence, he bit clean through his pipe stem, and the bowl crashed into the ceiling, showering both of us with flaming cinders.

“Bloody pipe!” snarled Edwards, fiercely brushing them off his hair, “they’re always doing that!”

Threshold memories are frequently associational, dependent for their substance on time or location.  In 1944 our growing family moved into a stucco house on Woodbine Ave.in Little Silver, where, standing under a hickory that we called the Big Tree, I would ruminate on national news like FDR’s death and the atom bomb.  Our house backed up on a large rustic area that, though private, was terra libera for children’s games like baseball or football.  Surrounding this wilderness was a narrow graded drive, along which grew a number of trees.  One of these, large and many-branched, we called the Love Tree, because over the years because over the years its soft bark had become a kind of canvas for such tender expressions as JhxMB or RBxKA.  Somewhere around age 12, I thought of putting the Love Tree to a more productive use.  One of my female classmates lived across the drive, and it occurred to me to climb a few branches one evening to get an edifying view of her bedtime preparations.  Accordingly, I sneaked out one night and began climbing.  My reconnaissance   patrol was going well until, reaching up for the last necessary branch, I felt not wood but something unnervingly strange – something that moved and made a guttural noise.  It turned out that, instead of grabbing a branch I’d grabbed the left foot of Robin B, a boyhood friend and neighbor.  Robin had apparently preceded me on a similar mission.  After whispered salutations, we parted swiftly.

By 1954 our family had grown to six, and these six, complemented by pets, friends,, helpers, and regularly visiting relatives, all combined with our father’s business success, called blatantly for a larger venue.  After much consideration, my parents decided on 435 Spring St., a ridgetop colossus whose acreage spanned the Little Silver/Red Bank boundary line.  Included in the array were a garage, a spacious old carriage house, a tennis court, an imposing columned porch, a community of small glens and hedges, and a few acres of thick and terraced lawn.  This array, garnished by a pair of new Buicks, would easily have been the answer to a bourgeois teenager’s prayer, were it not for the fact that, as oldest son, I was forced to take on the duties of mowing the lawns, shoveling coal into the big furnace, babysitting, and serving long terms of gruntwork and salesmanship at my father’s garden furniture shop.  

In addition to these delights and toils, the house had a history.  Built during the 1890's, it had speedily become a training clubhouse for leading professional boxers, including the notorious Kid McCoy.  This middleweight, who served time in San Quentin for the murder of his seventh wife in 1924, was emulated in our house-to-be some 20 years later by a wife who with blazing revolver, pursued and gunned down her husband on the main staircase.

But 435 Spring St. was not just a historical monument.  It was, at least during my years there, a house with a living memory.  That memory belonged to a man named Roy Stibbs.  Roy was a familiar presence in the clearings and groves of 435.  He did odd jobs for my father.  His best-known activity was care of the jumbo tomato garden just south of the carriage house.  He was small, slender, and of then-unknown age (we now know that he died in 1984 at age 102).  His face was sympathetic but alert, and his eyes, whether trained on a person, animal, or object, were the eyes of judgment.  Roy was garrulous, indeed almost incurably anecdotal, but simultaneously secretive.  Pointing a camera at him would inspire a baleful glare and necessitate a speedy exit. I photographed him once and still feel the chagrin.

Roy lived near us on Spring St .in a crumbling beige Victorian, behind which he grew vegetables and tended bees, whose stings he used, with conspicuous success, as remedies for arthritis.  Afternoons after school, he was often to be found somewhere near the tomatoes, surrounded by a troop of local children.  He would regale them with tales, the most celebrated of which he called the Story of the Palomino Rat.  Though it was well known among the kids, I don’t remember ever hearing it told.  He would also spin yarns about great boxers who had dignified the premises, or his own early career as a race horse jockey in the South.  Because he was full of wise words and quite unlike anyone they’d ever seen, children viewed him as some sort of forest god.  For my own part, I often didn’t see him at all.   His faded clothes and earthen tan matched almost perfectly the muted browns and greens of the estate. His wrinkles mimicked the bark of trees. But this natural camouflage added something almost spiritual to our encounters.  Roy was not just an old gardener.  He was a Presence.

For all their space associations, and activities, the six Grudins were a close-knit family, and I was particularly integrated in the family structure because, from my middle teens on, my father had loaded me with responsibilities.  These, together with high school and numerous adolescent avocations, combined to make me, if not the most productive, one of the busiest of teens.  Because I neither defaulted nor complained, I was in due time ready to be packed off to college.  But here family placidity broke down and coming-of-age perturbations kicked in.  Over the trimly buttoned down Princeton, I chose the suspiciously leftist Harvard – a choice that gave my father cold sweats at night.  Worse yet, I accepted an invitation from my college friend Sarah, whose family owned an oversized patch in the wilds of Mendocino, CA.  At this my dad, in his quiet way, went seismic.  Having exhausted rational discourse, he decided to starve me out of the plan.  But he hadn’t reckoned on my siblings, who pooled their resources to see me off.  

Early on the assigned morning in early June of 1957, I stood by the old Red Bank railroad station, waiting for  the New York train, just then arriving to pick up passengers.  But I was startled at the beep of a Buick, from which emerged my father, bathrobe-clad, extending me a handful roll of bills.  

Why are these all “threshold memories?”  Thinking of my father’s unexpected bathrobe, or Roy Stibbs’s Palomino Rat, or Philip Edwards’ Blitzkrieg pipe, I am struck by the thought that, though thoroughly rooted in fact, these memories had lain for decades in a mental pile of disregarded odds and ends.  Now, however, sought out in context, they have entrapped me in a thicket of nostalgia.  Suddenly, because of them, the past has become the present and has laid hold on me insistently.  I can think of no more helpful explanation of this than that memory, perused and appreciated stubbornly enough, will give up the secret details that have originally burned it into the mind.  At that point it loses is vagueness and becomes like an ancient creature, preserved I amber that is both durable and transparent.

Red Bank Station, Built 1875False Memories and  Scapegoating

Another, very different interaction between memory and the unconscious results in false memories.  I’ve seen these described as “fake” memories and “invented” memories, but such terms are misleading.  “Fake” and “invented” imply conscious will on the part of the rememberer; but “false” can apply to memories that are in error but appear accurate to the rememberer.  False memories can arise from a variety of clinically discernable reasons, most of which relate to the mind’s need to maintain its balance in the face of disturbing forces like anxiety, envy, frustration, and anger.  Thus false memories frequently participate in another neurotic syndrome, known academically as “scapegoating,” referred to by psychologists as a means of externalizing one’s inner discomforts onto another person or group.  In this case the false memories, which arose as neurotic symptoms, develop into rhetorical cudgels with which the chosen scapegoat can be attacked.  The scapegoat will often be a family member, for family members tend to generate the oldest memories. And of family members the scapegoat is likely to be older than younger, for elders wield authority and can thus be most easily targeted by frustration.

The victims of scapegoating are often  individuals who are viable in their social worlds.  In fact, it is their very viability – their willing interaction in society – that frustrates and motivates the scapegoater.  For this reason the neurotic false memories created are frequently exaggerations of the scapegoat’s comparatively healthy behavior patterns.  Parents who occasionally must restrain or discipline a child are cast on memory’s stage as tyrants.  Older siblings, who are the first to advance into peer relationships, are pilloried  as self-centered and neglectful.  Happy marriages, professional success, productive lives, which make them attractive to people in general, can incriminate them in the eyes of sufferers who, no matter how accurate their claims of having been victimized, crave nothing more dearly than a victim of their own.

Because this need is as profound as it is unfounded, there is no quick defense against or cure for scapegoating, in individuals or in its larger social configuration as bigotry.  Psychological therapy can help in the individual case, but only if the counselor avoids the Freudian blunder of vilifying the past.

A Prayer to Memory

Somewhere over the rainbow

Way up high

There's a land that I heard of

Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow

Skies are blue

And the dreams that you dare to dream

Really do come true

Someday I'll wish upon a star

And wake up where the clouds are far

Behind me

Where troubles melt like lemon drops

Away above the chimney tops

That's where you'll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow

Bluebirds fly

Birds fly over the rainbow

Why then, oh why can't I?

If happy little bluebirds fly

Beyond the rainbow

Why, oh why can't I?

-Harold Arlen & E.Y. “Yip” Harburg

Yip Harburg’s lyrics for “Over the Rainbow” were composed to meet the challenge of partner Harold Arlen’s soaring melodics.  As completed by Harburg and performed by Judy Garland (The Wizard of Oz, 1939), the song not only won an Academy Award but decades later was voted the No. 1 popular song of the 20th century by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and the National Endowment for the Arts.  Together with the brilliant movie that it crowns, it has become an American icon.  As well, it is one of the greatest modern tributes to the power of nostalgia.  The singer relates a memory from early childhood (“once in a lullaby”) of a cloudless utopian land where bluebirds fly and troubles melt away.  This remembered vision, this reification of a fairyland that is no more corporeal than a line in a lullaby, exerts such power over her imagination that she sings of it as something quite real and expresses her aspiration to go there.  The singer’s yearning for the future realization of a dream born of ancient memory conveys the power of memory to enchant present time, and possibly even to redeem it.

The resounding success of “Over the Rainbow,” possibly, inspired Harburg’s friend and mentor, Ira Gershwin, to create his own romanticization of memory in “Long Ago and Far Away” (“I dreamed a dream one day”) written to music by Jerome Kern, and performed in the 1944 movie, Cover Girl.  But Harburg did not invent the poetics of nostalgia, which can be traced back to Homer.  Its survival into modern times was signaled, a half-century before “Rainbow,”, by the following poem:  

Song of the Wandering Aengus (1899)

William Butler Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood, 

Because a fire was in my head, 

And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 

And hooked a berry to a thread; 

And when white moths were on the wing,         5

And moth-like stars were flickering out, 

I dropped the berry in a stream 

And caught a little silver trout. 

  

When I had laid it on the floor 

I went to blow the fire a-flame,  10

But something rustled on the floor, 

And someone called me by my name: 

It had become a glimmering girl 

With apple blossom in her hair 

Who called me by my name and ran  15

And faded through the brightening air. 

  

Though I am old with wandering 

Through hollow lands and hilly lands, 

I will find out where she has gone, 

And kiss her lips and take her hands;  20

And walk among long dappled grass, 

And pluck till time and times are done, 

The silver apples of the moon, 

The golden apples of the sun. 

The Writer’s Craft: Building and Arming Ideas and Memories

How do you become an accomplished novelist or memoirist or poet?  Writing teachers will coach you in framing viewpoints and attitudes, achieving pace or dwelling on detail, choosing words, establishing tone, managing transitions, and other forms of technical stylistics.  But with due respect, I must object that in so doing, they’re not only putting the cart before the horse but shooting the horse dead in its tracks.  And how far will they get with a dead horse?  Not quite around the block. With luck their students will get to be writing teachers.

What are they all missing? To write genuine poetry, authentic memoir, or lively narrative,   writers must convey feeling, and writers can’t feel until they have opened their senses to the drama of life as lived, and attuned their creative sympathies to the emotions of others.  This means that the five senses, instead of merely operating as means of self-preservation and pleasure, are laid ajar to allow experience free access to the mind.  Thus welcomed, experience implants itself in memory; and memory, like some organic armory or living toolbox, becomes the medium for expressing future literary energies.  This would seem to be the process by which Joseph Conrad converted his remarkable supply of maritime experience into vivid narrative, and the same process by which his friend John Galsworthy politely poached Conrad’s game.  Its pedigree traces back to the Romantic/Transcendentalist tradition, through Ralph Waldo Emerson’s image of the “Transparent Eyeball” and, because openness of the senses implies a broadened range of subject matter, to Robert Burns’s poem “To a Mouse” and Walt Whitman’s “The Noiseless Patient spider.”

Openness to experience then, is the baseline from which technical mastery must develop.  But openness to experience cannot be ingested like some elixir.  It cannot confine itself to the avenues of pleasure and success:  the joy and beauty and painless satisfaction, but must grasp the rough ledges and walk the mean streets.  Further, it must be practiced and ingrained like some uncompromising Asian art.  Engaged, alert, and esthetically vulnerable, writers may then, and only then, seek to learn and apply the arts taught by writing teachers.  In so doing, they are likely to take on the mysterious double character of good artists in general: one side innocent, malleable, incurably observant, capable of being kidnaped by the very next idea, event, or memory – the other side piratical, pragmatic, even manipulative, ready to steal a memory or kidnap an audience.  You will need this latter side to arm your subject matter, to make it compelling, viable and resilient before sending it forth into an otherwise-occupied world.

But practicable as it may be to talk about the double character of good writers, it’s much harder to gain and maintain it.  It’s even more difficult, but occasionally attainable, to use one’s newly-gained technical skills to open, in an audience, the wellsprings of emotion and the hidden gates of wonder.



An affectionate caricature of Emerson’s “transparent eyeball” by Christopher Pearse CranchDublin, November 19-22, 1960: the Memory That Wrote Itself

Early in the 1990 sci fi blockbuster Total Recall, the hero, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, visits what purports to be a memory implantation shop.  Their sales pitch is that while real memories are expensive, chancy, and toilsome to accumulate, implanted memories are cheaper, more perfect, and risk-free.  Though the movie as a whole does not measure up to the subtlety of this satiric jeu d’esprit, some credit is due the story- and script-writers  who realized the profound value of remembered experience.  After all, would you rather climb the Matterhorn or remember climbing it?

Something like this must have been on my mind when I began my motorcycle tour of Europe in the summer of 1960.  Not that I would buy a handful of memories even if they had been available at discount.  My goal was rather to amass a store of memories that would provide me with a lasting perspective of western Europe and its people.  My specific plans were to put major emphasis on a five-week stay on Mykonos (funded by a graduation present from my grandfather) and a year of study at Trinity College, Dublin (funded by a Fulbright-type grant).

My plans for Dublin involved finding myself a couple of cosy rooms and disappearing into them for long periods of reading and reflection.  I didn’t expect to do any writing, because my writing energies, expressed in a bundle of poems during my teens, had more or less dried up.  The cause of this psychological  barrenness, which would last till I was nearly thirty, has only recently become clear.  As an adolescent writer, I’d been laboring under the Romantic illusion that good writing was pure inspiration, fostered by talent and drawn from the heart.  Assuming this, I had hermetically sealed off my writing life from my life as lived.  I failed to realize that in so doing I was starving both lives.    

Otherwise young and healthy enough, I was clinically word-sick.  But the project of building memories in Europe and Ireland turned out, unbeknownst to me, to be the beginning of an extended convalescence.

This healing process began with aimless wanderings down the streets of Dublin in the fall of 1960.  Back from one of these jaunts, I scribbled an ode to the city that began

A beggar with a flageolet,

A woman singing to her dog,

Gray fronts and granite steps that speak

Of a remembered mystery....

...and, perhaps fortunately, never quite ended.  But I began to feel what many Dublin writers had felt before me: that the city and its surroundings were in and of themselves a kind of cultural poem, unfinished and self-prolonging, that one need do little more than harken to, in order to write productively.  This sense of a haunting civic eloquence was brought home to me decisively on the night of November 19, 1960.  It was a Saturday, and that day I had lunched at the home of John Montague.  John, who though young was  recognized as a poet in a nation where the title of Poet was only slightly higher than the title of Duke, educated me that day on a variety of Dublin topics, the most emphatically described of which was the Wren’s Nest, a highly atmospheric pub on the outskirts of town.  I resolved to visit it on my motorcycle that very night.  Three days later, I filed in my journal the following report:

Saturday night I had driven in the rain, losing myself (for Montague's instructions were hazy) miles to the west of Dublin until finally I saw after long darkness a dim light and a small jumble of cars, and then the sign, "The Wren's Nest."  The metal door was locked from the inside, but I was heard and admitted into a low room lit by oil lamps.  The ceiling was made of rough plaster applied to corrugated metal.  Six or seven men in overcoats stood by a battered, warped bar, the tap - handles - of which were of porcelain.  I began to speak with the man who had let me in, a shy and giggling young farmer.  The proprietor also wore an overcoat; he was over sixty and either very lame or one-legged; he drew from the tap not stout but porter, a weaker, cheaper drink.  As we all drank on, the men were inspired to tease an elderly man at the end of the bar named Hughy, who obviously enjoyed it, and always answered with an obscenity.  Another man was inspired, his cap across his eyes, to play Irish marches on the harmonica, and while he was playing, I, first slightly drunk, looked around the lowlit room and then down into the shadows behind the room.  A most sudden fragrance filled the room then.  It must have been that someone opened a box of exquisite snuff, but I for the moment felt that I was to be enveloped by some great fragrant presence emanating from the age and sweetness of the Wren's Nest itself; that snuff on my drunkenness gave me a certain feeling of tender ghostliness which only smell can excite.  The tap handles and the bar were shaking rhythmically but looking up I saw it was because the musician was tapping his foot.  He was so drunk that he seemed hardly able, swaying, to support himself; he seemed suspended, hung from his harmonica, which he held in both hands and sucked, swaying as on a rope from the ceiling.  The proprietor was noisily rolling a heavy wooden keg of porter towards the spare taps.  With a wooden mallet he hammered the spigot into the barrel, and the porter foamed out into a clay pitcher and two pint glasses.  A loud clock struck 11:00.  Closing time.  But no one minded it, and about 10 minutes later the proprietor asked the man what time it was.  “About a quarter to.”  "Approximate Dublin time,"  the proprietor mumbled.  Once, in the Wren's Nest, a friend of John Montague's heard a conversation like the following;  "terrible floods in England, aren't they?"  "But what about those floods in Africa?  Crocodiles crawling around in the streets..." 

Why call this journal entry “the memory that wrote itself”?  because, as I review the body of the handwritten text in my journal, there is not a single correction.  This unaccustomed calligraphic correctness suggests, first of all, that I was uncommonly receptive to new experience on the night of Nov. 19.  After chatting with the farmer, I must have fallen into Wooden Indian mode and was sopping up new impressions without feeling the necessity to respond to them.  Secondly, it suggests that I showed a total willingness to listen to my memory when, three nights later, it dictated what I should scribble into my blank book.  I was grabbing and preserving an elusive sequence of events before it faded into nothingness. Finally, it suggests that, between the 19th and the 22nd of November, I had remained transfixed and overcome by an experience that had all but rewritten me as a literary observer.   If earlier I found Dublin a charming town, I now discovered that its charm had a sting that could infect me with a lifetime of wistfulness.

The Wren’s Nest has moved solidly and comfortably into the 21st centurry.  It is more lavishly housed than it was in 1960, and it boasts its own page on Facebook.  I have changed too, both for the better and the not so better, as has my world.  But I can still, from time, feast on a memory lit by oil, perfumed by snuff, and shaped by tipsy music and the rhythm of rain on a corrugated roof.



PART VI

MEMORY AS ART AND ARCHIVEMusic as Memory:  Homage to Johann Abraham Peter Schulz

My early childhood years were spent in a houseful of music.  As an only child until almost age 4, I would enjoy pastimes befitting my age while my mother devoted all her available time to singing or even dancing to tunes on the radio or Victrola.   During these times I developed a quasi-religious veneration of popular songs by the likes of Harold Arlen, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, and George Gershwin, and of lyricists whose fancies helped me build my own world of imagination and romance.  But even more formative were the 78 rpm recordings of classical symphonies and suites that sat in their weighty boxes on a living room shelf.  My mother replayed these insistently, until their complex tones saturated my mind.  Listening to the decisive phrases and seemingly inevitable transitions of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, I developed my first impressions of law and nobility.  Listening to the ominous opening and thrilling mood-swings of Schubert’s 8th, I first saw, in a kind of tonal painting, the essence of romance and adventure.  As years passed, I could not help but look at these masterpieces as discoveries of natural wonders, remembered, revealed and shared by genius that could converse directly with the heart.  Seeking in vain to unpack this psychological phenomenon, I could only conclude that great music speaks to a part of ourselves that is usually secluded and hidden.

Many years later, by a series of lucky coincidences, I was able to learn that a theory of how these psychological phenomena occur was written and talked about in Beethoven’s and Schubert’s time.  Johann Abraham Peter Schulz, a musician and music theorist of the later 18th century who was especially interested in the composition of songs, had written that art songs that were truly touching assaulted the listener with “the illusion of the unsought, the artless, the familiar:   in a word, the folk song, by which means, it impresses itself so immediately and continuously upon the ear.”  In other words, what Schulz extolls is a musical form of artful simplicity and quasi-careless familiarity that surprises and captures the spirit.  But why the sense of familiarity?  How can an artistic innovation – say, one of Schubert’s Lieder– produce in the listener a sense of deja vu?  Because the kind of music Schulz prescribed, and Beethoven and Schubert often composed, evokes the simple songs of childhood and is frequently built on a harmonics of natural overtones.  The work of the early Romantic composers exploited these dynamics to their fullest.  It would seem that this effect is available to other art forms as well.  I have felt it when reading Poe’s final poem, “Annabel Lee,” and Alain-Fournier’s novel, Le Grand Meaulnes.

What does all this mean in a simple sentence?  That art can access and affect our faculty for forming, maintaining and recalling memories.Memory as Social Archive: Homage to Studs Terkel

Society has a copious means for the care and feeding of cultural memory.  These cover everything from the professional – archeology, academic historiography – to the popular – taking snapshots, keeping scrapbooks, shopping for antiques.  Even a dig in the dump behind an old house may unearth some valuable aspect of the past.  But archives hold a special place on this long list.  Documents preserved in archives are often hard to access and difficult to interpret, but they just as often yield rare insights into their  historical subject matter.  Especially interesting in this regard is the work of Chicagoan Studs Terkel (1910-2006), who transformed the archive from a treasure reserved for specialists into an eloquent and wholly accessible medium.  His thirteen books of “oral history,” including The Good War, Working, Hard Times, Division Street America, and Race, are comprised of hundreds of interviews, meticulously taped by Terkel from Americans about the ordinary but consuming events and conditions of life in the 20th century.  These books complemented Terkel’s regular radio show, significant parts of which have been archived themselves.

Terkel’s collections were of course, the fruits of cutting-edge commercial  technology: the relative cheap and easy-to-use portable tape recorder.  But this would have been of little value to him if he had not been a brilliant interviewer, profoundly literate in popular culture and uncannily skilled in getting to the heart of his subject’s remembered experience.  Add to these skills large measures of elbow grease and pure panache, and you have one of the 20th century’s most concise and comprehensive historical resources.

The demographics of Terkel’s oral histories are, as they should be, comprehensive and generous.  Take the contrasting styles of two of the most compelling interviews of The Good War:

“The military seemed a world apart. Through all those years -- the normality of Harding, the boom, the bust -- the army was less than a hundred thousand. It just wasn't part of a normal person's experience. The Pentagon had not yet come into existence. The military budget was, of course, much smaller, The war ballooned the whole thing and became a major part of everyone’s life.

-Telford Taylor

 “they told me that a shell had hit the house of my girl. We had been going together for, oh, about three years. Her house was a few blocks from my place. At the time, they said it was a Japanese bomb. Later we learned it was an American shell. She was killed. She was preparing for church at the time.”

 -John Garcia

Telford Taylor was one of the outstanding public servants of his day – a day that, fairly measured, lasted at least five decades.  Educated at Williams and Harvard, he enlisted in the military in 1942.  As a lieutenant colonel, he led the US contingent of code breakers at Blechley Hall.  Soon after the Nuremberg trials began, Taylor, now a general, was named chief prosecutor, and after retirement he remained active as a historian and professor.  Notice that, in his interview he speaks in complete paragraph style, with one point leading logically to the next.  John Garcia, on the other hand, was an apartment manager, who had been in his middle teens at the time of Pearl Harbor.  His narrative, unlike Taylor’s, is somewhat disordered, as though warped by the power of the tragic events described.  Yet this adds to, rather than detracts from, the force of his words.  The contrast of perspectives between Taylor and Garcia speaks, in brief, to th rich variety of Terkel’s historical method – a variety so broad and so fecund that it democratizes history in a manner not wholly different from Walt Whitman’s democratization of poetry a century earlier.  Through Terkel’s symphonics of memory, the idea of America took another step towards realization,Consciousness and Memory

What is consciousness?  To understand the difficulty of this question, all we need do is read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, “Consciousness:”

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or something within oneself. It has been defined variously in terms of sentience, awareness, qualia, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood or soul, the fact that there is something "that it is like" to "have" or "be" it, and the executive control system of the mind.[3] In contemporary philosophy its definition is often hinted at via the logical possibility of its absence, the philosophical zombie, which is defined as a being whose behavior and function are identical to one's own yet there is "no-one in there" experiencing it.

Defining “consciousness” by the synonymous “awareness” is blatantly unhelpful because it fails to define “awareness.”   I would prefer humble a anatomical and  operational definition specifying consciousness as a frontal lobe function that receives, evaluates and transmits data.  Consciousness stands in relation to the comprehensive human character in roughly the same way as the executive branch stands in relation to the other branches of a corporation: analyzing corporate knowledge and focusing corporate energy.  It is what Shakespeare, when he has poor Othello fatuously boast of his own rational self control, calls “offic’d instruments.”  But what about memory?  I’d think of memory as housed on a long series of underground floors directly below the executive offices.  Their total number is huge, so huge that they are impossible to count.  They constitute the company’s intellectual treasury – a wealth of data, a plethora of analytic methodologies, and a compendium of expressive languages.  The executive branch is always eager to consult them, for they’re obviously esential to its functions.   But they are not stable and perennially available, like library books or digital files.  Instead, they are like living spirits, varying in their moods and substance, transient in their availability, supple in their content.   Some, which I have mentioned earlier as “threshold memories,” flicker on and off like the faint and slowly pulsating radiance of a distant lighthouse.  Others, leering malevolently, crouch in the upper stairwells, ready to play havoc in some executive office.  Indeed, it’s an executive responsibility not only to exploit memories, but also to moderate them.

Physician/Philosopher Robert Fludd’s chart of the mind and its sources and constituents in his Utriusque Cosmi, (1617-24). Note Memoria in the upper right. 

How does this informal metaphor connect with the homages to Johann A. P. Schulz and Studs Terkel that precede it?  To answer this question is to learn a small lesson about ways in which creative thinking can mine the resources of the brain.  Terkel founded The Good War on the premise that disparate memories of a great event, conveyed clearly and in substantial volume, can conjure up an overarching image of history that compares well with the work of a single historian, no matter how accomplished he or she may be.  Terkel may have even been of the opinion that a multifarious confusion of memories can offer a more accurate image of global and individual events that were themselves dauntingly multifarious.  Schulz, on the other hand, suggests an esthetic strategy that interferes with and inspires the very faculties by which memories are formed and recalled.   Like Terkel, he uses memory as an artistic material and enriches it in the process.

PART VII

MEMOROLOGY AS GEOGRAPHY

Visiting the Past

One sign of a scholar’s genuine learnedness is a respect for memory that boarders on reverence.  This passion, which sometimes lasts well into old age, may be complemented by an obliviousness to “real-world” current events, but in any case it is the sign of a character that generously and humanely navigates the province of the past.  For such personalities, memory is more than a pleasant diversion, more than a professional implement; it is a universal and essential skill comparable in importance to breathing.  A rather poignant story attests to this proclivity.  When my university colleague, classicist Steven Lowenstam, was about to have a malignant tumor removed from his brain, he asked the surgeon, if possible, to leave the Alexandrian Library alone.  What kind of loony request was this?  Anyone with a smattering of classical history would know that the original Alexandrian Library, after enjoying centuries of fame, had vanished completely by the 5th century A.D.  Not even sketches of it, or contemporary works describing it, remain.  But Steven, conscious of its importance as a key historic link in the development of Western literature and history, had built a construct of the Library in his memory and, thus internalized, it was prized as an essential part of his character.  

Steven Lowenstam died of cancer in December, 2003.  Although I did not share his academic interests, I share his implied intuition that memories, like living vines, bind the human character together.  My reasons for reaching this conclusion are less imaginative and direct than his.  They bring me once again to my eventful trip through Europe in 1960-61.  Overshadowing my disorganized wanderings and acquaintances of that year was the goal of building memories – memories that would provide a foundation, or better yet, a springboard, for the involvement in professional life that would necessarily follow.  As I packed my motorcycle with two bags and aimed it for Paris, it was with this purpose firmly in mind.  I was 22, with a year to kill and nothing but a brainful of fuzzy opportunities, and I was not about to waste a single one of them.

As it turned out, I would stay in Paris at least six times over the next decade, during which period my memories of that city invaded and colonized a place in me as sovereign and secure as the Alexandrian Library must have been for Steven.  This mental parkland included favored retreats like the patisserie near the church Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois, whose evocative carillon played every morning in the Place de la Louvre, the market at the Place de la Contrescarpe, the dreamlike Parc des Buttes Chaumont, the hovering stained glass in the Sainte Chapelle, and the ancient church of St. Gervais, whose north side, still scarred by damage from German artillery of World War I, sat near the former home of François Couperin, musician to the King.  Other components of my mental Paris include the morning symphony of smells, with featured solos by fresh coffee and fresh bread, the shops where each new entrant would warmly greet all those present, “Bonjour, monsieurs-dames,” thus giving the City of Cities a kind of village charm, and the unalloyed cheerfulness of nearly every face passed in the street.  There were unforgettable individuals, too: the banker, middle-aged, and impeccably dressed, who, after telling me that he could not yet honor my traveler’s checks, pulled about $20 in French notes out of his pocket and loaned them to me; Grillo (Felix) della Paolera, the Argentine literary internationalist who one night, in some classy Champs Élysées apartment, showed me a room whose walls were alit with diamonds; Howie Rower, a leonine wit and wanderer who hitched on my motorcycle all the way to Florence, stopping at each town of note to telegraph a marriage proposal to his beloved Mary Calder, and  George Whitman of the revived Shakespeare and Company Bookstore, who, as he had to many others,  gave me room and board in return for menial labor, including a dinner that featured the hilarious drunken babble of Gregory Corso and Peter Orlovsky; 

Remembering Orlovsky (1933-2010) at dinner , I should pause a moment to recount one episode of his conversation that pleasant evening.  The anecdote is worth noting because it involved a memory that, like many memories, is essentially visual, and also because it portrayed an element of behavior  that, like much of French culture, was at once thoroughly sensible and outrageously obscene.  Late in the dinner, perhaps after the laughter from some Corso anecdote had subsided, Orlovsky swept the table with a glance and loudly asked, “What’s the most disgusting thing any of you’s ever seen?”  

Shocked into silence, we all just gawked at him.  Finally Whitman pushed back.  “OK, Peter, what’s the mst disgusting thing you’ve ever seen?”

Orlovsky was well prepared.  “Well, here’s mine.  Last summer I was walking down a country lane near Strasbourg and, glancing over a low fence, chanced to see a cow in a pasture.  But Mrs.Vache wasn’t chewing grass.  She was looking straight out at me, and as she looked, she gave this high MOOOO! of pain.  Why?  Well, there was this farmer sitting on a milking stool right behind her, with his right arm halfway up her ass, maybe trying to ream her out after a bout of mal de saison.  The man followed the cow’s stare, confronted me, and gave me this look.  Orlovsky raked the table again with a perfect rendition of a French grimace known to all of us, a grimace that in detail meant “This may seem strange to you, but to me it’s just business as usual,” or, put more briefly, “So what?”  This set the table at a roar.

I’ve had to fill in a blank or two in this memory, which was generated over a half-century ago.  But one thing I can recall almost perfectly: Orlovsky’s grimace.  I say almost perfectly, because this grimace, in all its crude profundity, was immortalized by the French actor Fernandel (1903-71), and the mystique of the Fernandel Face carries importance as a classic link in the development of Western culture.  



the Fernandel Face

George Whitman above his shop, 2008

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Whitman#/media/File:George_Whitman_by_Olivier_Meyer.J



Finally there was Maurice, who ran Chez Maurice, a hotel/restaurant whose placard read “Cous-cous Tous Les Jours,” remotely ensconced on the Rue Mouffetard,  in the darkest reaches of the Quartier Latin. The neighborhood was not far, either geographically or culturally, from the street that George Orwell described so graphically in his memoir ,Down and out in London and Paris:

It was a very narrow street—a ravine of tall, leprous

houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as

though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse. All

the houses were hotels and packed to the tiles with lodgers,

mostly  Poles, Arabs and Italians. At the foot of the hotels

were tiny bistros, where you could be drunk for the

equivalent of a shilling.

Maurice himself was iconically sordid, garrulous, gross-gutted and unkempt, the sort of hotelier who looked fit to be kicked out of his own hotel – that is, until you saw the hotel, which suited him as if bespoke.  I chose it as a temporary residence partly because of its rooms’ low price, less than a dollar a night, and partly because all day its kitchen perfumed the neighborhood with the seductive aroma of roasting chicken which, served with fluffy couscous, was Maurice’s special and only dish.  Unlike my room, which was very cheap, my dinners there were outright free.  Maurice had appointed me his cultural envoy, paying me with a complimentary meal for every emigré I brought to his establishment.  

Maurice’s invisible mate probably did the cooking, which was surprisingly wholesome.  His housekeeping was somewhat less meticulous.  He would enter our rooms in the early morning and, first loudly announcing that his shoes were clean, climb onto the bed fully shod and start sweeping the sheets with a well-worn broom.  Guests’ feeble complaints neither restrained him nor flapped his good humor.  He carried his intolerable strangeness with unflappable aplomb.

On one of my last nights in Paris, a handful of us had dinner twice.We had dinner chez Maurice and then scattered for occasions of choice.  At about 2 AM we reassembled at an eatery in Les Halles, which was in those days the largest wholesale/retail vegetable market in the world.  Around an outdoor table, in an impenetrable mist of onion soup, we listened to the lively chatter of the farmers and truckers, and marvelled that a single experience could be at once so everyday and so ravishing.

Les Halles, which had been the commercial hub of Paris for centuries, was demolished in 1971, to be replaced by a shopping mall.  The city of Paris, while retaining much of its architectural panache, now struggles to face swelling tides of tourism and terrorism.  The most agreeable time I’ve spent in France over the past 40 years has been a month in the tiny village of Caillac.  But my memories of Paris in my youth remain, incastellated from time or decay.  It was not the Paris of August 12, 1916, when Jean Cocteau spent a day photographing Picasso, Modigliani, Max Jacob and their likes, or the Paris several years later when, after taking in a performance by Josephine Baker, you might have run into Hemingway or Fitzgerald or Gershwin at Harry’s New York Bar.  It was an altogether less jazzy and headlined time, when a city, newly recovered from war, offered visitors indefinite opportunities to indulge in the performance of life.

Josephine Baker in her banana costumeThe Athletics of Recognition

When Johann Abraham Peter Schulz asserted that good music, no matter how new, should seem familiar, he appears to have implied that good art achieves a psychological conjunction, an organic connection between experience newly apprehended and forces already profoundly present in the mind of the beholder.  Esthetic experience can ring true when it finds a nest in memory.  It inspires, willy-nilly, a moment of recognition.

Of course this process is not confined to art.  From journeyman tasks to the highest professional levels, day-to-day challenges require the integration of fresh data with memory-based resources.  These resources may not be as emotionally intimate as those accessed by art, but nonetheless are of critical importance to self- fulfilment and professional success.

But herein lies a challenge as daunting as it is unavoidable.  How do we organize our memories, and how readily, pertinently, and fruitfully can we access them?  In a career spent thinking about thought itself, I have never crossed paths with a compelling treatment of this issue.  A single sentence from Michel de Montaigne’s essay, “On the Education of Children,” comes closest:

Since I would rather make of him an able man than a learned man, I would also urge that care be taken to choose a guide with a well-made rather than a well-filled head.

But how would Montaigne describe a well-made head?  A careful reading of his Essays in full may suggest his answer.  Here I wish to address a more limited but related issue: how, if at all, can we manage our resources of memory in order to make them healthier and more productive?  I’ll give it a try, after a couple of corrections.  First, memory is not just a resource.  It is a living element in the mind/body function.  Second, memory is a treasure.  That is because learning any useful information or skill – that is, committing it to memory – releases hormones that make us feel good. Learning thus rewards us with a kind of happiness, an authentic happiness that wealth, power, fame, or love – conventional objects of ambition – are not certain to afford.  Just watch any very young person learning to walk, and you will imbibe a delight that can be repeated through various learning experiences for the rest if your life.

But learning experiences, dramatic as they are, are not enough to build a healthy memory.  Everyday attitudes – subtle aspects of character – hold major importance as well.  Let me briefly list some attitudes that spring o mind:

Thereness: showing up, listening, observing, asking questions, offering ideas, appreciating what is helpful, rejecting the useless.

Digestion: reviewing at least once the past events of the day.

Critical curiosity: actively probing experience for the beautiful and the ugly, the just and unjust, the genuinely funny, the like and the unlike, and, perhaps most of all, the problematic.

Concentration: weighing and analyzing the harvest of curiosity.

Amusibility: deriving enjoyment from novel nuances of recent experience.

Meditation: intellectual daydreaming, “thought experiment.”

All of these modes and attitudes tend to augment memory, organize it, and make consciousness more effective in accessing it.  None of these practices and habits directly relates to memory, but together they build a psychological platform on which memory can function.  To cultivate strong memories, we must first value and appreciate experience.

 

 Michel de MontaigneFreedom and Forgetting

Memory, which is in effect a living library of  consciousness, is also a survival skill.  Memory stores past experience in the form of knowledge that consciousness can recall to meet its present needs.  And if consciousness regulates our primary expressions of character, it is memory that supplies material for these expressions, and preserves the principles that support them.  To this extent, there is much truth in Robert Louis Stevenson’s bold statement that “The past is myself,” with the proviso that consciousness is constantly modulating old memories and producing new ones.

Memory serves, moreover, as a kind of conservatory, or sunlit display room, for imagination.  A lively imagination can ramble among the treasures of this bright space, associating some with others to produce new chemical compounds, or poetic metaphors, or combinatory formulas for uses of all kinds.  A sharp consciousness can also seek out and display the distinctions between things which, if connected, might result in destructive confusion.  During the Enlightenment, these talents of connection and distinction were known to philosophers as Fancy and Judgment, rival but fraternal components of human intelligence.

Memory, together with fancy, judgment, civil rights, constitutional government, and education in the Greek and Roman classics, stood among the key intellectual and political elements of rationalism that the Enlightenment bequeathed to the Western world.  But some of the same liberties and empowerments that came with this bequest have blinded the Enlightenment with their own economic glare.  Free-market corporate structures do not observe the checks and balances, the rights and regulations, that operate in constitutional polities.  Instead, they are more a replay of the feudal autocracies that the Enlightenment sought to replace.  Moreover, these autocracies, wielding decisive economic power and political influence, work constantly to warp constitutional government to their own ends.  This is not to say that corporate executives are bloodthirsty criminals.  Corporations are among the chief stanchions of global economic balance.  But we must admit that in the contest between pleasing stockholders and benefitting the public, corporations respond more readily to the tug of the former.

With due respect toward the many wealthy corporations that have behaved progressively or charitably, I can only conclude that this transfer of power has depleted what we might call social memory, and in particular our traditional conviction of the essential balance between public and private in a democracy.  The US Constitution guarantees a balance between the three main branches of government: congressional, judicial, and executive.  But what we have forgotten is the balance between these three branches – government itself – and a financially empowered contingent of the private sector.  In its zeal for protecting the people from tyrannical elements of government, the Constitution has left room for a wealthy minority of the people to subvert the balance of powers by wresting authority from all others.  As of early 2019, this menace to justice has bitten deep enough to paralyze Congress, polarize the Supreme Court, and put a political illiterate in the White House.

This administrative malfunction threatens more than a detail in the Constitution, more even than the balance of powers itself.  It threatens the laws that protect us and the very idea of government.Uses of Social Memory and Forgetting

Memory has served three major social purposes in the Western world.  

It can be implanted in the public consciousness by a government or religion wishing to strengthen its own authority.  In both cases, examples are too numerous to mention.

It can be enshrined as a divinity in itself by a culture prizing the liberal arts.  According to Hesiod, Mnemosyne (memory) was the mother of the Muses, and thus symbolized the mental acumen at the root of the arts.

It can be praised and cultivated as a skill unique in itself.  Two of the most dramatic moments in Homer’s Odyssey are when the maid Eurycleia recognizes the hero Odysseus by remembering an ancient scar on his thigh (Book 19) and when, as we’ve seen above, Odysseus proves his identity to his cautious wife Penelope by recounting how, many years earlier, he had built their conjugal bed on the trunk of an olive tree (Book 23).  Homer even brings a tear to the reader’s eye by showing off the memory of the hero’s dog Argus, who recognizes his disguised master aft an absence of more than 20 years (Book 17).  The Greek poet Simonides (fl. 500 BC) famously identified the crushed remains of his dinner companions after a building collapse by remembering the seating arrangement.  He was also known as the first writer on the art of memory.  Since his day until today, when I read a New York Times piece on how exercise can improve memory, the topic has been in the spotlight, and its virtues unanimously lauded.

But not all of these encomia withstand critical examination.  The control of information flow is vital to power structures great and small, and as vital to information past as it is to information present.  The recent Polish government initiative to ban public mention of the Holocaust is a vivid example of the organized murder of memory; but we need not look further afield than the state of Texas, to recognize the cult of the battle of the Alamo as a post facto glorification of a struggle to proliferate slavery.  Similar examples of much more startling proportions are legion, and today the institutional annulment of memory stretches as far as the US Capitol Building and the White House.

Navigating the Forgotten

One of the more active of the “private eternities” of my life were the 27 years I spent at a university, dividing my time between the refreshment of teaching classes, the excitement of philosophical studies, and the intrigue of academic research.   I say “intrigue” because my research, grounded in the Renaissance, instinctively gravitated towards personalities and subjects that had been, rather unfairly in my opinion, largely forgotten.  These propensities took me into a curious academic reality, a kind of knowledge junkyard or ghetto where the usual supports for scholarly hypothesis – knowledgeable colleagues, solid secondary material – were all but nonexistent.  Like some destitute outcast or pedagogical packrat, I’ve had to salvage bits of available information from yellowed indices, obscure letters, and seedy-smelling, worm-eaten Dewey-Decimal cataloged books.  By any professional standard, these were low-percentage efforts. What drove me on?  Back then, I probably could not have said.  But from this perspective, I might say that it was the thrill of snooping the back alleys of the past, in search of some relic of life or thought that might have some authentic meaning today.

These quests among the dark alleys of history were not only stressful but also, on the miniature scale that applies to literary scholarship, dangerous.  Literary academe is so dominated by old ideas and undeserved authority that publishing a genuinely new discovery is like trying to walk across a room that is carpeted, wall to wall, with other people’s toes.  If you’re unusually stubborn, resourceful, and resilient, you might still achieve successful publication.  But even if not, you can still savor the clearest pleasures of all – the zest of the hunt and the thrill of recognition.

PART VIII

THE POETICS OF AMNESIAMemory Lost and Regained: Wyatt, Shakespeare, Kipling, Dumaurier, Bergman

Themes of memory as a dialectic of loss and renewal are so insistent in modern Western literature as to justify a misty-eyed anthology of sentiment.  Though Marcel Proust’s unfinished novel,  À La Recherche du Temps Perdue (written 1909-22) is considered the talisman of such art, it is by no means the earliest or necessarily the most powerful example.  The idea of lost love as lost time is visited in the ancient Latin lyric and revisited in poetry from the Renaissance on.  Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42) combines an eloquent recreation of past love with a satire on the multiple infidelities of the times in They Flee from Me:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

She me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, “Dear heart, how like you this?”

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Two generations later, William Shakespeare, who had inherited some of Wyatt’s distaste for “newfangleness,” could entertain the idea of memory as a kind of spiritual preservative.  About to die by suicide, Mark Antony enjoins Cleopatra

The miserable change now at my end

Lament nor sorrow at; but please your thoughts

In feeding them with those my former fortunes

Wherein I lived, the greatest prince o' the world,

The noblest;...

And later in the play Cleopatra, under similarly fateful circumstances, asserts that her death will bring her back to the remembered past: “I am again for Cydnus,  To meet Mark Antony.”

The 18th century, with its Gothic Revival, and the 19th century, with its storm of novelistic virtuosity, enlarged on the theme of nostalgia, especially as the Industrial Revolution began to signal epochal changes in culture.  Turner’s painting of The Fighting Temeraire, shown below, is not only a nostalgic narrative of a mighty Trafalgar veteran being towed to its demise, but an implied satire, in that the engine of its destruction, the agent of modernity, is a dwarfish tugboat, belching smoke:

The Fighting Temeraire, by J. M. W. Turner, 1838

As narrative developed towards and into the 20th century, the idea of a lost past picked up an important new aspect:  the sense of nature.  This nature could either represent lost innocence, as in Orson Welles’s famous Rosebud, or a distortive agent of change, as in the highly figured opening of Daphne Du Maurier’s novel, Rebecca (1938), or as in the poem below, both:

The Way Through the Woods

by Rudyard Kipling (1910)

THEY shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago. 

Weather and rain have undone it again, 

And now you would never know 

There was once a road through the woods 

Before they planted the trees. 

It is underneath the coppice and heath, 

And the thin anemones.

Only the keeper sees 

That, where the ring-dove broods,

And the badgers roll at ease, 

There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods 

Of a summer evening late, 

When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools 

Where the otter whistles his mate, 

(They fear not men in the woods, 

Because they see so few.) 

You will hear the beat of a horse's feet, 

And the swish of a skirt in the dew,

Steadily cantering through 

The misty solitudes, 

As though they perfectly knew 

The old lost road through the woods.

But there is no road through the woods.

 

The persistence of memory, beset by touches of nostalgia, regret, and loss, provides an impressively thought-provoking revelation in Ingmar Bergman’s 1956 film, Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället), which details a short period in the outer and inner life of Isak Borg, a retired physician and professor, aged 78.   The film’s Swedish title, which can mean either (“wild strawberry patch” or “happy little place,” refers to an iconic memory from Borg’s distant youth: his family’s summer holidays at a rustic lake.   Borg’s self-searching, and the film itself, reach their conclusion when, after many travails, he falls asleep and dreams a happy dream about a visit to the lake.  In this dream he has arrived at a picnic somewhat late, and is informed by a maiden that, “There are no wild strawberries left.”  Nothing phased, he seeks out his parents, who greet him happily from the shore (see illustration).  In the psychologic context of the film, the statement that “there are no wild strawberries left,” is a simple admission of inevitable loss.  The Smultronstället, that is, the material embodiment of time past, cannot be saved, but his vision of his parents, which lacks materiality, is a redemptive memory that he can treasure. Such a statement can also be made about the redemptive power of art –even about the film itself – and in this context we may see Wild Strawberries as prefiguring Bergman’s autobiographical Fanny and Alexander and Martin Scorsese’s symbolic narrative,  Hugo.

Odysseus’ testy description of how twenty-odd years earlier, he had built his marital bed on an olive tree, quoted early in this study (p. ), is more than the testy assertion of identity that it first appears to be.  In Homer’s allegorical theater, it was a richly-detailed assertion of male heroism – of the aggressive intellectuality that makes Odysseus unique among Homeric heroes.  Thus when Odysseus pedantically tutors Penelope about bed-construction, he more or less rounds out Homer’s moral image of evolved masculinity, by emphasizing its faithful preservation of the past.

By the same token, however, defect or irregularity of memory plays a key role in fictional narrative.  This syndrome is particularly popular in movies, where the role of sufferer is typically played by a man.  Of these films the most romantically compelling concern is amnesia, whose classic victims are Ronald Colman in Mervy LeRoy’s Random Harvest (1942) and Gregory Peck in Alfred Hitchock’s Spellbound (1945).  Surprisingly, the flawed masculinity of these two characters does not detract from their cinematic draw.  Our interest in them is aroused by the personal charm of the actors, the suspense of their predicaments, and the sympathy that is channeled through their female counterparts (played, respectively, by Greer Garson and Ingrid Bergman).   We cannot, moreover, ignore an element of genteel fetishism.  In typical lovemaking and erotic fantasies, traditional male and female polarities are often reversed, and their quasi-reversal in cinema is no anomaly.  This topos was energetically exploited in the 1940's, which saw the heyday of strong female protagonists like Joan Crawford. Barbara Stanwyck, and Bette Davis.

Fetishist implications aside, the poetics of amnesia so deeply moves audiences because it threatens – and thus dramatically magnifies – the connection between human identity and the past.   It implies an alienation from selfhood, a numbing of autonomy, an intimation of death.   With equal intensity the restoration of memory, which is almost de rigueur at the end of these narratives, blushes with tints of rebirth and redemption

Given the artistry with which movie-makers like Bergman, Hitchcock, and Scorsese evoke the act of remembering, it would seem well-nigh impossible to compass a radically different but esthetically comparable tour de force.  Such a feat has been achieved, however, by a team of writer-directors whose names are seldom evoked without superlatives, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, who made their major films in the1940's.  The most aggressive psychological effect of this movie, The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), is to throw the intimate power and pressure of memory away from the main characters and onto the audience themselves.  The main plot concerns four decades of European history as it affects two military officers, one English (Roger Livesey) and one German (Anton Walbrook).  The curious memory effect is that the same erotic interest (played by the young Deborah Kerr as an equally young woman) appears over the decades in three roles, and she does so in such a way as to provoke and frustrate us.  Specifying narrative detail would be counterproductive.  Even if accurate, it would be confusing .  What is most easily said is that each of her continued reappearances evokes an irresistible sentimentality – the sense of a beauty and sweetness briefly present and then irretrievably lost.

But futile love is not the only element at work here.  Overall, Kerr’s roles convey an insistent sense of the ideal.  Michael Powell, who literally fell in love with Kerr during production, suggests this theme autobiographically:  "I realised that Deborah was both the ideal and the flesh-and-blood woman whom I had been searching for."



The final dream-scene from Bergman’s Wild StrawberriesPART IX

MEDIATING MEMORY

Unpleasant Memories

Simonides, father of the art of memory, is said to have approached the war hero and political leader Themistocles with an offer to instruct him in that art –  only to hear Themistocles respond that he would rather, if possible, be taught the art of forgetting.  This response was as rich in wisdom as it was in wit.  Themistocles was a man of restless temper and focused action; he had wrung withers, led assaults, drawn blood.  He was, moreover, according to Thucydides, a man of preternaturally keen understanding.  There is no way that such a man as this would lack numerous urgent memories, or that many of them would not be painful.  All of us, in smaller proportion, share this burden, particularly in the so-called Free World, where democratic values and free-market dynamics often spawn debate, competition and conflict.  Painful memories are thus among the prices of freedom, and we can draw some consolation chiefly by remembering what we’ve paid for.

A second consolation arises from evolutionary psychology.  A strong memory serves as a kind of lighthouse, protecting animals from repeating dangerous or painful experiences, and as an energizer, inciting them to repeat proven successes.  This strength appealed to the Renaissance mind so strongly that it became a philosophical and artistic idiom.  A late-16th century painting by Titian (seen below) carries the following motto:

EX PRAETERITO/PRAESENS PRUDENTER AGIT/NE FUTURA ACTION  DETURPET 

“From the experience of the past, the present acts wisely, lest it embarrass the future”

Titian’s symbolic emphasis on memory is a fruit of the Renaissance revival of secular historiography, whose founders had included Boccaccio and Petrarch.  Its most dynamic and controversial exemplar would be Nicolò Machiavelli (1469-1527).   Readers of his famous book, The Prince, were especially surprised by two of its prescribed attitudes, 1) its near-formulaic alignment of past results with predictive strategies, and 2) its apparent disregard for accepted ethical norms.  The book found students, if not converts, in political leaders (Thomas Cromwell and Emperor Charles V included), and was ideal material for playwrights Marlowe and Shakespeare, who found in it a riveting model of pure evil.   Shakespeare acutely associates Machiavelli with the historical imperative when in The Tempest villain Antonio invokes it succinctly with the phrase, “What’s past is prologue.” in order to convince his friend Sebastian to commit a murder (II. 1. 254).  With a historical irony that is quintessentially American, this sentence, snatched from its homicidal context, was proudly cut into granite as motto for the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC.

Remembered  Nightmares

In November, 2016, I was stricken by a blood infection that brought me within knocker-range of death’s door.  I spent that month and the next at  hospitals, while doctors gamely tried touch-parking techniques with a variety of antibiotics.  During those days I was often delirious, and so delusional as to require restraint.  Now, looking back from well over a year, I remember nothing at all of these days, except for my sleep-dreams, which were so realistic – so clear, so emphatic, so compelling – that I not only remember them but can imagine myself inside them to this day.  Of the dreams that I remember, five stand out as blockbusters, and all but one of these five are nightmares.  In one I’m penned up in a Moscow hotel room, informed repeatedly by the staff that my family are nearby, but never allowed to see them.  In another I’m immured in a  flat in Cambridge, England, next door to a van meant to return me to my home in Berkeley, but it’s uncertain whether the van is still in Cambridge or already near its destination.  In a third, I’ve been lured into a plush rehab center near Boca Raton, Florida, but allowed neither to leave nor to speak to my son, who’s looking for me in a neighboring hallway.  In a fourth I’m waiting endlessly at a large dining table in a Tuscan home, making dismal small talk with one of my wife’s distant relatives, while being offered neither food nor wine.  These dreams occurred during the progress of my fever, which reached its climax near Christmas, when I collapsed in a Berkeley rehab.  That night I experienced a very complex dream, a dream that narrated an indefinite number of sunny mornings.  It put me in a room whose bedside window looked out on a rustic scene, and as I lay in bed a man, probably one of my sons, told me, in installments, that my medical case had been taken over by a consortium involving my wife and children, a brother, my oldest Berkeley friend, the Costco Corporation, and the Swedish government, all of whom expected a speedy recovery.  This dream proved to be not only consoling but also, in general terms, accurate.

Why do these five belabored dreams haunt me in such detail?  Here’s my best guess:  the first impulse of the human mind – literally implanted in us by evolutionary forces – is to locate itself in space and time.  The faculty for self-location takes place in the hippocampus, which is also the main storehouse for long-term memory.  It is only from the security of this self-location that the rest of brain can perform other functions, like analysis, choice, and expression, ultimately establishing identity.  When this sense of self-location is interrupted, as mine was by fever and drugs, the mind can preserve its balance only by creating fanciful locations of its own.  More pointedly, it can play out, in dreams, the emergencies that it is currently attempting to survive.  Thus, whether I was in Russia, England, Florida , Italy, or Sweden, I was suffering abandonment and alienation, until being restored to the bosom of humanity in the last episode.  Guilt, Shame, Regret

Guilt, shame, and regret are all memory-related emotions because they all regularly concern past events.  As emotions, they are physically hormonal cocktails generated by our conscious focus on some painful element of remembered personal history.   Regarding guilt and shame, efforts to define the difference between the two (see, for example, these topics as raised in  Psychology Today) have largely been made by psychologists, who, though clinically experienced, are sometimes not quite as literate in the history or philosophy of language.  Let me try to put the distinction with brutal simplicity.  Guilt is the negative reflection of our own remembered actions as evil or otherwise hurtful.  Shame is a generalized feeling, often triggered by memory, of our own inadequacy to achieve any action: good, evil, or indifferent.  Regret may, and often does, intermingle with guilt, shame, or both.  Regret is the painful recollection of past action, or inaction, in the light of its possible alternatives.  

Guilt and shame both carry moral meaning, but regret suggests a moral anarchy.  I can regret  committing a naughty act when, under reversed circumstances, I would have regretted not having done so.

These three emotions can keep us up at night, but, on reflection, they all carry a measure of positive value.  Evaluating my own guilt and shame, I can, like Titian’s monster, use them as signposts for the future.  Evaluating my regrets, I can relocate myself in the sea of ironies and ambiguities otherwise known as active life.  More broadly, I may regularly revisit these emotions and their causes with the purpose that by accepting my past as past, I can evolve beyond it.

Though neither guilt nor shame is pleasant, both are commonly temporary downturns in spirit that can be offset by positive involvement in active life.  In extreme forms, however, they can become disabling distractions, sapping our concentration and eclipsing our joi de vivre.  This is especially true when one feels guilt and shame simultaneously.  Shakespeare gives us a brilliant example of this double whammy in his signature character, Hamlet the Dane.  Early in the play, Hamlet shames himself by raking himself over the coals as a coward:

 , A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing—no, not for a king Upon whose property and most dear life A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me “villain”? breaks my pate across? Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i’ th’ throat As deep Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?  as to the lungs? Who does me this? Ha! ’Swounds, I should take it! For it cannot be But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites With this slave’s offal. Bloody, bawdy villain!  

II. Ii. 593-608

but only minutes later, he indulges in a cacaphony of self-guilt before Ophelia:

  Get thee to a nunnery. Why wouldst thou be a breeder of sinners? I am myself indifferent honest, but yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me: I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offenses at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves all; believe none of us. Go thy ways to a nunnery. Where’s your father? At home, my lord. Let the doors be     III i 132-140

How can we explain this?  True, Hamlet is one of the great poseurs of theatrical history, but even his postures have psychological substance.  His uncle Claudius has seized power in Denmark, thus depriving Hamlet not only of the crown but also of his sense of his own human dignity.  And Claudius’ tyrannical rule has turned his own court into a guilt-ridden nest of liars and spies, not the least of whom is Hamlet himself.  Thus Hamlet’s complex of shame and guilt is psychologically plausible.   But that does not make it any less tragic.  In fact, it forces him into a position where, in order to regain a measure of justice, he must court his own destruction.

Aside

I’m now more or less halfway through this informal exploration of memory.  I began work almost two years ago, remarking in my journal (August, 2017) that

I’ve been working on this desultorily for awhile, actually waiting for it to take on a semblance of character, and this morning is the first time this seems to be happening.  Last night I had a particularly vivid dream about someone I haven’t seen or thought much about in 30 years, and the high point of that dream was my telling that person something that I hadn’t ever said to anyone else.  I woke up in fine fettle, brewed coffee, did chores, and then sat back in my oversized chair, suddenly remembered  my dream and began to entertain ambitious thoughts.

Thus the idea of this book first proclaimed itself as an imp of fitful disorganization.  So it remains.  When I’ve at last emptied the well, I will make an attempt to give the whole mess some developmental form.  I don’t eagerly anticipate that job..  

The only section of this book that has been researched at all has been this chapter on unpleasant memories, and here I must admit that the research was unintentional.  The year 2015 was devoted to completing a project that I’d long delayed: a novel set on island of Maui.  What I aimed to do was make the island ‘s lush but dangerous landscape the venue for a narrative rife with conflict, guilt, anger, ambition, denial, and, of course, suspense.  Once I had chosen this literary strategy, it became a sort of fixation, almost an addiction, and for a few months the book seemed to be writing itself.  But as it did, I became aware that one theme, like a dark intruder, had burst onto the scene and was shouldering other elements aside.  It was the theme of the Villain Past, of long-past events, desperately ignored and denied, that suddenly reemerge as present abominations.  Thus memory became one of the dominant agents in my composition, and I could not detail the deviltries it plays on my characters without evoking to some extent the pranks that my own bad memories play on me.  Hence this meditation.Memory as Microscope:

A few months ago, my wife Michaela phoned me from Kihei, HI, where she’d been cleaning out our home for sale or rental.  She wanted to know what garage items, if any, I wanted to have shipped back to Berkeley.  Duly, a few weeks later, two toolboxes arrived – one with a small assortment of power tools, another with some 25 pounds of weekend-warrior odds and ends.  Yesterday I tugged this latter box into the living room, opened it, and began searching through the tools.  I was looking for something that would speak to me of some aspect of my two decades on Maui.  I did not find it, but my search brought back an indefinitely swelling volume of personal narrative.  What I’d sought was an arrestingly handsome wood tool: a small planer, little used and still resplendent in steel and chrome, that had been given me by an old California friend named Dan Dana, who knew that I maintained the rudiments of a wood shop in my garage on island, and who had probably packed it at his home in Los Altos, CA, with the intention of expanding my small armory of fixit devices.  He had spent has career as a builder and was now retired.  I remembered distinctly standing with him in the garage as he told me that a manual planer should not be stored upright but rather must be laid on its side, in order to protect the delicate adjustment of the blade.

So it is with many memories, that enter the mind as solitary details and then flock through its portals in droves.  But as memory is naturally expansive, at times it can also be explosive......  The idea of a memory tsunami – a single detail suddenly opening a  floodgate of past experience – is well known in adult life and has been revisited in narratives from Homer to Hitchcock.  Its proven emotional impact is a rare example of the appreciation we have for times, places, and perspectives beyond our own.  When  Don Fabrizio’s old dog Bendicò, now reduced to a mere skin, momentarily regains its living shape in falling into the courtyard, it evokes and expands our continuity, our integrity in time.

Perhaps it is because of this – memory’s expansion of human character in time – that memory is so essential to narrative, that it haunts narrative like the ghost of a Muse.  The Odyssey, that oldest and greatest of tales, reminds us throughout that our lives are no more or less than series of voyages through time, and that though we cannot prolong them through the future , we can through memory prolong them into the past.

Memory and Love  

One’s strength of character is perhaps most clearly defined as equivalent to the direction, volume and resiliency of one’s loves.  And by “love” here, I do not mean the desire for possession of and intimacy with an erotic object, but rather something quite different: a kind of appreciative attention that engages one’s full consciousness in the experience of beauty.  Moreover, this beauty is not so much what can be expressed by a photograph or painting as a phenomenon that has bearing on intellectual or social reality.  Hugo Cabret, a  forlorn kid who patiently pieces together the springs and wheels of a forsaken robot, is engaging this sort of beauty.  Even a farmer, laboring productively in nature, loves, and thereby grows stronger in character.  Speaking of “the earnest love that laid the swale in rows,” Robert Frost’s Mower concludes

The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows.

My long scythe whispered and left the hay to make.

-Frost, “Mowing”

To apply Frost’s love of haymaking to his own art of wordsmithing, and other demonstrably creative pursuits, is to come up with a bracing new picture of what it means to be human.  

The characterization of intellectual achievement as a form of love may seem strange, but it is by no means new.  It was first limned out rather abstractly by Plato (Symposium, Phaedrus) in the 4th century BC and echoed influentially by chemist/philosopher Michael Polanyi as “heuristic passion” (Personal Knowledge, 1958).  For Polanyi as for many of us, the creative process is a nuanced act of love.  Nor can we ignore Freud and the neoFreudians, who variously interpreted creative work as sublimated libido.  This love, moreover, can leave its mark on the mind in the form of memory, thus making it more fertile for creative acts to come.  Readers with any doubts about these statements should consult Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s eccentric occupant of 221b Baker St., Sherlock Holmes, who had the equivalent of a clinical addiction to solving mysteries.  When in the process of detection, Holmes developed a kind of runner’s high, expressed not only in keen analyses but also in boyish pronouncements like “The game’s afoot!”  When not in service, he suffered a kind of withdrawal and self-medicated with cocaine.  Thus he was both a beneficiary and a victim of heuristic passion.

Conan Doyle's Holmesian metaphor of the "game" can be applied to some effect to my only personal evidence of the effect of love on memory.  In the middle of a prolonged graduate career I moved out of my ghetto quarters in downtown Berkeley and into An uphill  pastoral retreat on Shasta Road.  My flat had two comfortable rooms, pleasant neighbors, and best of all, a little arbored terrace to die for.  The fact that this terrace sported a table and chair inspired me with a forgotten feeling.  I suddenly desired to replicate the contemplative bliss I had felt in Fouschki’s garden on the isle of Mykonos.  I retreated into this green chapel of memory.  In order to maximize my solitude, I avoided classes in exchange for seldom-meeting tutorials and, aside from these and my teaching duties, dropped out of sight on campus.  

After a pleasant day or two of musing aimlessly at my table in the dappled sunlight, I encountered a scruple.  Why avoid formal studies in stubborn haughtiness when I had no meaningful achievement to justify it?  Or, better, why pursue a learned degree without learning a damn thing?  I managed to resolve this crisis of conscience by revisiting the best teachers I could find: the authors of my reading list themselves.  I pulled my favorite Renaissance writers from the shelves and began reading them one by one.  I read at leisure and with pleasure.  After each reading, I would write a brief essay in longhand, something like a letter to myself, detailing what problems each book posed, what implications it conveyed, and how these problems and implications could improve our understanding of the Renaissance and the birth of own era.  I did not intend to publish these essays or submit them to anyone.  If I had any over-arching purpose, it was my own improvement.  Perhaps more precisely, I was playing the game for the game itself. 

These months spent reading and writing became the most important formative period in my career.  They established a memory of commitment, affection, and unalloyed eagerness that became the emotional headwaters of all my research and composition to follow.  From them I gained confidence but , more importantly, a defiant resolve to protect labors of conscience from a collegiate administrative system so unapproachably second-rate that it wore its mantle with pride.

PART IX

MEMORY MECHANIZEDMemorizing Identity

Some time ago, on a train heading north through the Val D’Aosta in Italy, I found myself embarrassed but fascinated by a strange demonstration of memory.  From Milan on north, my wife and I had sat facing each other in an otherwise empty section of four seats, but in Turin a newly-boarded passenger took the window seat next to me.  We exchanged greetings. He was a man in his fifties, genial of manner and dressed for the civilities of public travel. Though deferential, he was in no way shy.  Within minutes, we’d learned that he was a native of Turin and that he’d long ago developed a friendship with the famous Turin writer, Primo Levi, when they both served in the partisan resistance against the German army in 1943-45.

Perceiving my interest in the WW2 background, our friend – call him Torinese – launched into a specific and extended war story.  Taxing my limited control of Italian, I did my best to punctuate his emphases with stock responses – “Appunto” (“precisely”), “Senz’altro” (“Without a doubt”) – until, hearing what seemed to be a stroke of dark humor, I lowered my eyes and smiled.

When I looked up, I saw how wrong I’d been to show amusement.  Torinese’s face was contorted and covered in tears.  In a voice now half-choked, he concluded his story of having seen comrades brutally slaughtered.  I managed a “Peccato” (“How Sad!”), pitiful, but the best I could do.

Torinese, apparently oblivious to my gaffe, got off at the next stop, leaving me time in my seat to ruminate about his performance.  For ‘performance’ it almost certainly was.  Over our years in Italy, we were again and again audience to displays of all sorts: badges of office, landscaped moustaches, operatic local journalism, humble cottages sporting treasure chambers of family inheritances.  Our brief interlocutor Torinese had apparently specialized in memorized verbal displays: eloquent narratives that,  highlighting and dramatizing personal history, established him socially as a man to be noticed, respected, remembered.  His performance was so ably conceived and nobly presented that he could stimulate his own tears and probably do the same for generations of listeners.  As such, his story was not only individually memorable but also representative of a culture that, for over 2000 years, at every economic level, had treasured and elevated displays of all sorts, but in particular the act of speech. 

I had a similar experience some time later in Los Angeles while attending a gala hosted by the Signet Society, my old college club.  The speakers that night were authors George Plimpton and Joan Didion.  Didion spoke first.  An intense-looking, slight, dark-eyed woman of middle age, she grasped the standing mike as if for support.  She spoke about a favorite theme, social and cultural issues in America, and her voice rang with such supercharged emotion that she seemed stricken by the fear, anxiety and frustration of the dispossessed.  At times her frame seemed wracked with emotion, and her shoulders rose and bent again as though struggling against gusts of irresistible feeling.  When, after 20 minutes, she acknowledged our loud applause and walked from the room, perhaps brushing away a tear, we in the audience caught our breaths.  Plimpton came next.  Apparently aware of our fatigue after experiencing such a spontaneous outburst of feeling, he gave us all a moment to recover before approaching the mike and saying, “What a fine speech!  I’ve heard it many times.”

Plimpton’s remark was not only sublimely catty but also decisive in making Didion’s talk unforgettable.  It inspired me remember her in two ways: as an observant and eloquent social critic and as a performing artist who could move an audience without a stage.  Were she and Torinese con artists?  Arguably, but con jobs I would not have missed for the world.   Besides, they were teachers.  As sinners condemned indefinitely to the social world, we are all performers, and those who perform best are they who teach us the arts of emotion. Memoirs, Memoranda, Memorabilia, Mementos, Memorials....Mnemosyne 

Memoirs, memoranda, memorabilia, mementos, and memorials are all parts of the social paraphernalia of memory.  Each in its own way nourishes, advertises or habilitates that faculty which alone gives us continuity and identity along our lifelong ride.  In one sense, they are relatively commonplace items.  But in another, more meditative sense, they resemble the symbols, texts, and rituals that serve to sustain a major religion.  To take this comparison lightly would have been an insult to thousands of Greeks who worshiped Mnemosyne (Memory) as a living goddess at about the time when Simonides was beginning to teach the art of memory.  Mnemosyne, who rose to religious prominence as part of the cult of Asclepius, was legendarily both physically adorable and intellectually respectable.  After nine consecutive nightly trysts with Zeus, she brought forth all nine Muses.  Thus, from a mythographic perspective, Memory was seen as the mother of all the intellectual, esthetic and academic arts.  Her pragmatic skills were venerated as well, for she shared Asclepius’ role as lifesaver, who could prevent the brain-numbing effects of the Underworld river Lethe.

Granted, it would be vain to use the details of legend as proof of anything.  But they can be evidence that people under certain circumstances valued certain ideas, and thus they can tell us something about the history of the human condition.  In the case of Mnemosyne, we can see that her worship, combined with the teachings of Simonides, sparked a multidisciplinary tradition of study that would peak in the Renaissance with Hermeticism, Machiavelli, Titian, and Giordano Bruno, and lead to Leibniz at the doorstep of modern science.  It should not be surprising that the Corpus Hermiticum, whose influence was felt by Paracelsus, Bruno, Bacon, and Shakespeare, calls memory “governor of the world.”

But in acknowledging the prominence of memory in ancient theology and its importance to early modern thought, we must not ignore the extent to which this mental faculty was exploited by authoritarian power structures, particularly religious ones.  This exploitation is effected through priestly authority, childhood inflictions, specific laws, regular ceremonies, and, to varying extents, a variety of the  memoirs, memoranda, memorabilia, mementos, and memorials that conserve and refresh memory.  Strict observance of such tenets and proceedings is rewarded by divine favor or pardon.  When possible, such observances would be complemented by financial donations. The system of observances, prolonged in time, forms a memorial bedrock that ultimately established faith as an expression of personal identity. Thus memory – here seen as accompanied by communal trust and faithful observance – unites a religious community that prospers in a spirit of acceptance and support.  So also, under different circumstances, can memory become the slave of a sanctimonious power structure that advances political interests and suppresses free thinking.

My experience on the fringes of such a system goes back to elementary school in the mid-1940s.  I attended school in the small and comparatively ancient community of Little Silver, NJ.  So small and so ancient was it that no one can remember with any certainty how it got its name.  In many ways our school was forward-looking, much in the manner of John Dewey’s program of Progressive Education.  We did visual arts, music, and drama.  We practiced self-organized security (“Safety Patrol”) and even created our own charity.  But, in mild defiance of the letter and spirit of the First Amendment,  we were also compelled to enact regular verbal mechanics (pledge of allegiance, psalm-reading, hymns) aimed at fostering the continuity of a patriotic Christian community.  These observances were reinforced by a calendar of establishment-based holidays.  This combination of liberalism and conformity mirrored that of the community at large.  Our populations were diverse and tolerant, but their subtext was white and Protestant.  And though I left all this eons ago, I have little trouble refreshing it in memory.  The hymns and carols, on occasion, play in my mind.  The feeling of alienation from a conscientiously self-righteous community returns to me regularly, quite often accompanied by mild chagrin or wicked imprecation.



PART X

MEMORY AND THE SELF

Memoir as Tragedy: the Story of Hemingway’s Paris

At the beginning of this book,I offered the reader a few anecdotes.  These brief tales, including the Hemingway quote, all carried some sort of surprise, and the overall effort of the collage was to express the excitements of the everyday that can survive into the future, affecting personal character along the way.  Anecdotes, with their payload of surprise, not only empower the speaker, but also draw the listener into a world of irony, impropriety, and immediacy that access the disorderly undercurrents of culture and reject its bland expectations.  Thus anecdotes can convey a state that thinkers fifty years ago might have called “the wisdom of the absurd” but might be more modestly put as the reverence for reality.

My opening anecdotes concluded with a section in which I characterized certain memories as comprising a kind of spiritual pharmacy of preserved excitements,. I quoted Ernest Hemingway’s remark about his memories of Paris:

If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.

I added this quote late in composition, because I’d never seen it before I decided to write a brief section on memoir, and had chosen Hemingway’s Paris as my focus.  Because its title was, fittingly, A Moveable Feast, I mistakenly expected the memoir to be something like a writer’s celebration of memory, full of colorful descriptions, memorable characterizations, tangy exoticism, and wry humor.  What I found instead was, with a few notable exceptions, more like a literary sanatarium, moody in content, uneven in quality, shadowy in tone.  Interesting exceptions include the poignantly affectionate memoirs on Sylvia Beach and Evan Shipman,, but they do not allay the reader’s disappointment with the short book’s lack of thematic coherence or psychological relevance.  Or the sense that  A Moveable Feast had its share of ill-matched courses and half-empty plates.

Much of this can be explained at least partly by a look at the book’s compositional history.  During Hemingway’s early years in Paris (1921-26), he filled a series of notebooks with records of his daily life, which included serious friendships with such memorable characters as Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Scott Fitzgerald.  Before leaving Paris in 1926 he neatly stored the notebooks in a trunk and left them in the basement of the Ritz Hotel.  Thirty years later – years crowded by four wives, two wars, an impressive body of writing, and, above all, the monumental labor of being Ernest Hemingway, he returned to the Ritz for lunch and was reminded, by CEO Charles Ritz, of the trunk’s existence.  Reunited with his notebooks Hemingway began building them into the superstructure of a coherent memoir in 1957.  Although he completed more than one draft, he had submitted nothing to a publisher at the time of his suicide in 1961.

A few more historical details.  During composition Hemingway left a zigzag vapor trail of locations: Cuba, Idaho, Spain, Cuba, Idaho.   All while suffering from a more painful, menacing and destabilizing array of physical and mental issues than most men of his age could survive.   I won’t recount a single detail of these, for they are already thoroughly documented.  What I want to explore instead is how these sufferings, exacerbated by increasing age, helped make A Moveable Feast one of the most unusual memoirs ever written.  

What makes A Movable Feast so unusual is that one cannot read it appreciatively without sensing that it seems to be two books in one.  One book is a wistful and evocative, though disjointed, memoir of Hemingway’s early years in Paris.  The other – call it a metabook – is the voice of a writer thirty years and many sorrows down the line, a voice that hauntingly insinuates old age, regret, agony, and inescapable guilt.  One hears this second voice in a prose style that, though characteristically canny, informative, and burnished, betrays a poverty of joi de vivre, and also in the negative portraits, particularly of Fitzgerald, whom Hemingway portrays rather passive-aggressively as a brilliant writer but a failure in the fine art of being a man.  And this ominous second voice can not only murmur but also accuse, as it does in two snatches of dialogue so biting that each could well have been the excuse for writing the chapters that include them.  In a central chapter slyly titled “The Man Who Was Marked for Death” – a chapter that does not even mention the death of the man referred to – the tubercular poet Ernest Walsh asserts that Hemingway, young, strong, handsome, and vigorous, is “marked for life,” and our narrator responds, with carefully scripted gallows wit, “Give me time.”  And in an early chapter called “The False Spring,” after a prolonged discussion of shared memories, Hemingway’s wife Hadley judgmentally asserts that, “Memory is hunger.”  The remark to Walsh was self-consciously prophetic: by the time of composition, Hemingway had enough calamity in store to consider himself ‘marked for death’  Hadley’s pointed remark that “Memory is hunger” flouted Hemingway’s own book title, driving a stake into the heart of his characterization of memory as a “Feast.”

A Moveable Feast concludes with a chapter called “There is Never Any End to Paris,” a chapter that deals almost exclusively with glossy memoir of Hem and Hadley’s skiing adventures in the Austrian Alps.  It then pulls up short with a page and a half of labored confessional, narrating indirectly the affair with Pauline Pfeiffer that destroyed his marriage, and with it the happy days with Hadley that had given his Paris years some resemblance to a ‘feast’  I say “labored” largely because, in this brief conclusion he ascribes this catastrophe to his and Pauline’s “innocence,” a word that a world-weary 60-year-old might well have emended to “pig-headed self-interest.”  But of course literary confessions rarely befoul themselves with the mud of truth.

A word of caution to would-be readers of A Moveable Feast: there is no faithful, authorized edition.  The book, apparently, was never completed to the author’s satisfaction, and various editors have had their way with the text.  Readers interested in learning something genuine about the book should exploit all available scholarly resources and console themselves with the author’s final words on the subject: “This book contains material from the premises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”

From this desperate declaration, allegedly the last words Hemingway ever wrote, we may discern symptoms of the inner turmoil that, to various degrees, threatens all writers of memoirs: the troublesome risks of self-portrayal.  Given that the subject matter of memoir is personal experience, how much of your personhood do you, as writer wish to justify, excuse, or spotlight in your narrative?  This choice,, simplistically put, depends on two other variables: how intrinsically compelling are the events that you describe, and what stylistic attitude will best convey their intrinsic merits to a reader?  Hemingway’s treatment of these variables in A Moveable Feast may be summarized as follows: the main body of his narrative deals with characters and interactions of such  notable interest that they make self-absorption unnecessary; the author was content to treat many of them with his acknowledged sophistication and considerate humanity.  In the concluding sections on Scott Fitzgerald and Hadley, however, his focus is magnetized in another direction: he must elaborate, and to some extent glorify, his own behavior towards Fitzgerald, and he must diagnose and indirectly excuse his own destructive behavior towards his first wife.  It is this self-absorbed lapse in tone that may have kept him dissatisfied with his manuscript and enforced the fatally desperate admission that the book, “contains material from the premises of my memory and of my heart. Even if the one has been tampered with and the other does not exist.”  This disclosure can, for all its ruefulness, teach us something about memory.  Hemingway’s “tampered with” memories, quite possibly those concerning Scott Fitzgerald and the author’s conflicting “loves,” are less like fruitful reconstructions of experience, than like ghosts, implacably accusing the author of treasonable bad faith.  And his final statement attests that tampering with one’s own memory is an attack on one’s own heart.

Hemingway’s ups and downs as a memoirist send a counsel to all who wish to express their memories in print: “Write with candor, sympathy and, when possible, humor.  But subtract the self.  You will be better and longer known for what you love and what you prize than for seeking to be prized and loved yourself.”

Microsoft at the O K Corral

One summer’s day in 1963, in a fine south-facing office in midtown Manhattan, a friend and I had the pleasure of meeting A.Whitney Ellsworth\.  Dressed in a business shirt and linen pants hitched to suspenders, his legs stretched out to a tiny landing pod on his desk, he didn’t bother to rise, but rather beamed at us benignly, and then guided our gaze to what was giving his feet so little resting room: a huge, wholly disorganized, unstably supported pile of brand new hardback books.  His positioning gave the overall effect of a Tibetan priest considering his new mountain monastery. Sitting up, Ellsworth asked me if I’d care to review one, but I, awed by the bizarre scene, timidly demurred.  

Ellsworth was a few months into what would become the most important work of his life: the publishing of the New York Review of Books.  

The memory of this meeting remains unusually clear in my mind, perhaps because it is an iconic memory, a moment in time symbolic of the rampant disorder that’s so often a characteristic of new-fledged enterprise.  Phenomena of this sort made their most historic reappearance over the decades beginning around 1980, with the Icarian rise of the computer and the Internet.  The tempest of ideas and money that accompanied this rise resulted, over the first twenty years, in a new version of the Wild West, in which ambitions were unbridled, courtesies abandoned, conflicts fatal, and cruelties merciless.  Intermittent corporate gunfights reached their bloody peak when Billy the Bully, otherwise known as Microsoft, finally confronted the local sheriff, otherwise known as DOJ.  Billy had been very, very naughty.  He’d been naughty to his customers, putting them through unnecessary confusion.  He’d been naughty to his own employees, keeping them ignorant of why they were developing projects.  He’d been naughtiest of all to his competitors, using every available means to force them out of the PC marketplace.  Finally,in DOJ, he found that he’d  met his match, and stability of a sort was finally restored to Tombstone.

But this stability, won so violently, remains in constant peril.  There are new sources of turbulence, e.g. hostile foreign cyberattacks and information theft.  There is an increase in “monetization” practices that make Internet services look like bait-and-switch con jobs.  But most persistently of all, digital culture has suffered from what we might call birth defects, i.e., mental vacancies native to the practice.  Some of the symptoms are easy enough to detail.  Once, when I worked as a speaker/consultant in Silicon Valley, a conference attendee approached me with a problem.  “I feel that there’s no real communication among the staff.”

I asked what kind of company it was.

He replied that it was a firewall company.

I hope that as early as that evening, perhaps over a glass of Chardonnay, he might have realized that the communications problem was coeval with the goals of his corporation.  But that realization wouldn’t have gone far enough.  In the decade of my contact with Silicon Valley, I noticed that even those companies dedicated to communication had bunker mentalities, and that the chief cause of blockage was the urge, in the breasts of corner-office types, to retain sole control of executive power. Control freaks, it would seem, morph  easily into control nerds.

Computerese and the Debilitation of Language

The thought of nerds and nerdism conjures up one of the most flagrant symptoms of Internet pollution: the corruption of language.  Words are as critical to the Internet as dollars, for both are media for the transmission of value.  Yet the Internet, which is generally accurate down to its last penny, is substantially less careful with its words.  Typos abound; words (e.g., “Media” as a singular) are callously misused; headlines read like encryptions. Texts are pockmarked with every acronym ever invented, and locker-room slang is slung about like wet towels.  With a few notable exceptions, copy editors have become as extinct as dodos.  The industry’s deliberate name choices are even more ominous.  Looking at the largest companies only, we may conclude that Apple, Yahoo, and Facebook are all impertinently childish.  “Microsoft” sounds like a cross between a diaper and an ice cream cone, and “Google” sounds like a baby coughing up pablum.  Buzzfeed and Twitter vie with each other to be the Miss Universe of American vulgarity.  Only one of the top producers made a solid choice: Amazon, a name that was both respectable and prophetic.

Speaking of ridiculous namings, we come at last to the name most relevant to our subject here: memory.  Apparently the term was coined early in the development of computers, before storage was internalized in the later 1980s.  During those early days, “stored” information was external (e.g., floppy disks) and the only stored information was briefly present in the circuitry that processed data.  Therefore this processing circuitry was christened “memory.”When internal storage came in, it resembled human memory more than the processing circuitry, but the term memory (RAM) had already taken root.

By coincidence, I left my last professional interactions in Silicon Valley with the distinct impression of having met many people who had no regard for memory of any kind.  I remember telling a group of techexutives, at the end of Q and A, that corporate cultures of any sort, ancient or modern, create their own distinct moral climates, and that the same standards of simple decency applied to all of them.  The audience response sounded like feeding time in the rattlesnake cage, that is, if you tried barehanded  to feed them pizza.  With my last words, in a quavering voice, I warned them that anarchic business strategies would not succeed in a real-life marketplace.  While this comment won me no friends, it proved to be roughly prophetic.  The next year, 2001, the dotcom bubble burst, causing a short but bitter recession that was ascribed, by then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan, to “irrational exuberance.”



“Step Back and Contemplate”: Memory and Journalism

In early April of 2018, as America was fretting over the increasing pressure of the Mueller Russia probe, the New York Times published an editorial that began as follows:

Why don’t we take a step back and contemplate what Americans, and the world, are witnessing?

Early that Monday morning, F.B.I. agents had raided the New York office, home and hotel room of the personal lawyer for the president of the United States. They seized evidence of possible federal crimes — including bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations related to payoffs made to women, including a porn actress, who said that they had affairs with the president before he took office and were paid off and intimidated into silence.  That evening the president surrounded himself with the top American military officials and launched unbidden into a tirade against the  American law enforcement officials — officials of his own government — accusing them of “an attack on our country.”

-New York Times, Editorial, April 10, 2018

The short phrase, “step back and contemplate,” seems sedate and gentle enough, but in fact challenges the distinction, deep and profound, between journalism and history.  Like a machine spewing ticker-tape, journalism recounts a series of loosely connected events, while it falls to historians, usually years later,  to assemble these events in coherent form and interpret their meaning.  To “step back and contemplate” is thus a challenge to transcend routine media limitations and come to grips with the broader reality that current events, like arrows, unanimously point to: in this case a Constitutional crisis that threatens the equilibrium of a nation.

This contemplative approach, typical of the Times at its best, invites the reader to reject the monodimensional view of present time as a moving moment and adopt instead a multidimensional view of the present as a place seated in the landscape of history.  It challenges us to think more inclusively and more aggressively. 

On the other hand, people whose minds feed on the normal journalistic routine, who consume news events as isolated data and quickly forget them, are apt to be unable to perceive cause and effect or follow developing history.  Such people are vulnerable in large numbers to political manipulation by players like Cambridge Analytica and can cause cockeyed events and corrupt procedures like the US Presidential election of 2016.

PART XI

DEPTHS OF MEMORY

Memory as Curatorship

As I have grown older, my use of memory has changed.  I do not mean changed in terms of subject matter, but rather in terms of the use that I put it to.  As I see fewer people, participate in fewer activities, and observe fewer responsibilities, I pay active attention more and more to the past.  Formerly an indispensable professional source, my memory now is more of a retrospective theater.  Obviously one of the most conspicuous signs of this change is my decision to make memory itself my object of study.  It’s now the work that I do, because I think that it ought to be done.  I actually feel a mildly absurd sense of curatorship.  Recently I was sitting with five other people, all younger than I.  The history of cigarette smoking, its rise and its fall, had come up, and I asked if any of my companions had ever heard the 1947 Tex Williams song, "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette."  Though the song had found a corner of history by selling a million copies, none present had heard of it.  In my squeaky, superannnuated tenor, I treated them to the refrain.

Thus we preserve history.

Of course this pleasure of preservation is balanced by a growing sense of alienation.  A preserver of antiques, I am now also myself an antique, a kind of time-boat gradually losing itself in a vast ocean of oblivion.  This worrisome voyage is also a potential abandonment of the marketplace, for though I can still manage a youthfully brash book or two, the generation of editors who gave my work some breathing space, have moved on to new pastures or are best known by their obituaries:

Corlies Smith, a New York book editor who in a 50-year career published an all-star list of writers, from Muriel Spark and Jimmy Breslin to William Trevor and Calvin Trillin, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 75...

Mr. Smith, who was known as Cork, was one of the last of a breed. When he first went to work, in 1952, publishing was a still a profession for tweedy, Ivy League types who, in their younger days at least, were required to down multiple martinis at lunch and then put in an afternoon's work. Mr. Smith fit the bill perfectly.  NYT, 11/24/04

and the current phalanx of editors and agents, with the heroic exception of those supporting this book,who generally are forced by market pressures to behave less genially and think more defensively.  I can’t blame them for this.  Indeed I feel their pain.  How can I make it big time in American publishing when the publishing industry itself is in the dumps?

The reasons behind this parlous state go back nearly a century to the first real revolution in modern media consumption: the advent of commercial radio, which in a few short years vaulted into competition with newspapers, books, and other print media.  Television shouldered its way into the main-stream media in the late 1940's, and the Internet had joined the frontrunners by the late 1980's.  Printed books retain their personal mystique in spite of all this.  Indeed, their format has several major advantages over competing media.  But their market is increasingly consumed by digital carriers, including smart phones that provide everything from personalized news briefings to bedtime stories.

Though not formally demonstrable, it is likely that these technological and economic trends have had discouraging effects on other aspects of American culture.  Illiteracy and marginal literacy,, which have remained constant at 43% since 2006, are causally connected to poverty, drug abuse, obesity, crime, and many other social ills.  Print illiteracy, moreover, is cognate with other illiteracies: cultural, professional, political, moral, analytic, expressive, creative, and conceptual.  Sufferers from these ills are unproductive and crippled by ignorance.  They are easily deceived by hucksters and political mountebanks.  As such, they are not worthy to be citizens of a democracy.

Even among the “fully literate,” moreover, there is cause for alarm.  Author Maryanne Wolf cites a variety of contemporary research publications in support of her thesis on the negative effects of digital media on reading comprehension:

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.

What has all this to do with memory?  Literacy of any sort is a primary function of memory.  The two fit together like hand in glove.  The following meditation will explore their implications on American democracy.Memory, Beauty, Justice, Symmetry

As a living resource, memory maintains not only our personal history but also the regulatory and analytic instruments by which we manage it.  Lying in the depths of memory, these instruments are spurs of passion and gauges of value, and of these, three of the most important are those that address beauty, justice, and liberty.  I emphasize them because together they form a trinity of human judgment and aspiration, and because the three are intrinsically connected with each other.  Symmetry would seem to be the common element that binds them together.  All the “higher animals,” as well as fish and trees, exploit bilateral symmetries for their balance and/or mobility.  Symmetry gives beauty to every delight-inspiring vision from the bust of Nefertiti and the Taj Mahal to the face of an owl.  Justice is little more than a symmetry of action in time, a balance between act and response.  Justice is a temporal symmetry between the things we do and what we get for doing them.  Freedom is built on symmetry because, at its best, it is grounded on justice and political equality.  Civically conceived, equality is an interpersonal symmetry that can lend  balance to liberty and social order.  It is no coincidence, then, that the Athenian Parthenon, long recognized as an iconic statement of beauty, radiates symmetry (even though it is not precisely symmetrical), was dedicated to the goddess of justice, carried additional implications of democracy and liberty, and, even down to its matching Doric  columns, symbolizes equality.  Symmetry, then, is not just a formal idea.  Rather it can be seenas the indwelling principle of human dignity, sympathy, and wonder.  Or look at the bust of Nefertiti just below, where symmetry functions as the geometry of love.Detail, bust of Nefertiti, probable work of Thutmose, 1345 B.C. Egypt,

PART XI

MEMORY AS TEACHER



Professing Knowledge as Memory

A friend of mine will occasionally remind me of things that I said or did but I  cannot remember at all.  To these remarks I have no response except a shiver of embarrassment.  Another friend  will remind me and others of memories that, depending on his state of mind, are or are not to be trusted.  Such are to be judged in mental court and, if convicted, sentenced to oblivion.  My father would habitually remind me, accurately but accusingly, that I’d once asked him for a large sum of money.  My mother would often remind me of something nice that I’d done, but it was always the same thing.  Do I enjoy such intimations?  In general I would prefer being forgotten. 

On the other hand, as a teacher and writer, I have insisted on conveying knowledge as memorably as possible.  This can be done, I like to think, by giving knowledge the semblance of a living thing, a being that sits in the mind like a well-treated and observant house cat. But such pets are difficult to acquire and to tame.  Knowledge, indeed, is like some small jungle predator: hard to locate, impervious to capture, artful in escape.  We cannot share it effectively with students or readers without access to our own jungle: that endless forest of metaphors, jests, images, puns, paradoxes, and anecdotes that can make human language both wild and pertinent.  Such antics can decorate language in a variety of impressive ways, but most importantly for a teacher or a writer, they can produce an explosion of surprise.  And surprise is the mother of memory.  

Earlier I confessed that my own memory is tonally inconsistent: sometimes refreshingly abundant,  sometimes oppressively perverse.  Since both of these manifestations display an alarming prolixity of detail, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that my memory is a kind of freak  – born of a gross appetite for sense experience and driven by an equally excessive appetite to reify in words such experience as I’ve consumed.  Thus tilted towards voracity and compulsion, I’m particularly sensitive to surprises and first impressions.  The first page of ths book describes my curious third birthday present from the O’Rourkes, which introduced me to the essence of surprise.  A half hour later, treated to a birthday cake, I had my first taste of mocha icing, and have been mocha-addicted ever since.  Months earlier when, newly recovered from a cold, I stood on the doorstep of our little house in Fair Haven, NJ, and drank in the fresh warmth of late spring morning, I imbibed a sense of renewal that would remain a permanent archetype of imagination.  And, even before this, near my first home, in East Orange, NJ, I saw from my baby carriage a few dumpling-shaped white clouds afloat in a vivid blue sky, and was imprinted, for the first time, by the face of beauty.

PART XII.

RememberersLearning to Learn

Homage to Alex Weygers

Learning is a process with many faces.  We can learn whether we are concentrating or relaxed.  We can learn by instruction, by imitation, or by absorption.  We can learn by conflict or compliance.  Our dreams can teach us as we sleep.

One of my most powerful learning experiences began on Fallen Leaf Lake, near Tahoe, one summer in the late 1960's.  A friend brought me to a lakeside cabin whose owner had leased it out to a man named Alexander Weygers –  in return for services rendered – services that involved finishing off and decorating the cabin.  Entering the living room, I was struck by the brilliance of Weygers’work.  He had not only masterfully achieved the paneling and shelving but also crowned them with classically eloquent wood sculptures.   It was like walking into a work of art.  Weygers, a trim, athletic figure of a man in late middle age, greeted me cheerfully.  He conversed with me long enough to let me know that he was a Dutch East Indian who had given up an engineering job in order to indulge his personal ambitions in California.  

Over the next decade, on frequent visits to California, I picked up more and more information about Weygers.  During these years, he was building his own house in Carmel Valley, using land bequeathed to him by a friend, and mysteriously-sourced materials.  He had no paying job, no grants, no patronage, but he was single-handedly developing one of most enviable residences in the area.

In 1979 we rented a house near the village of Carmel Valley, and I had the opportunity to renew a number of old acquaintances.  Among these was Weygers, who, nearing 80, had by now finished building his house, together with a shop, impressively equipped to produce engravings, wood sculpture, stone sculpture, metal sculpture, and tools of all sorts.  Weygers had completely dropped off the financial grid.  His inherited land now boasted a productive farm.  He picked up necessary goods by trades or the exchange of services.  His building materials were acquired through a process he called “night salvage:” a term that, politely put, signified the practice of nocturnally relieving building sites of excess gear.  Scrap-heaps of all sorts were to him treasure troves, full of items that his fecund imagination and prodigious skills could transform into dazzling new shapes.  His shop doubled as a classroom whose student body grew in size as his national reputation spread.

Weygers’ long and fruitful life was a milestone in the development of recycling and sustainability.  Let me fill in with two biographical quotations, both from the Internet and mostly from the publications of the Weygers Institute:

Alexander G. Weygers (1901-1989) has been likened to a modern-day da Vinci. A prolific sculptor of pieces hewn with his own handmade tools, he was also a wood engraver, photographer, carpenter, machinist, inventor, blacksmith, beekeeper and engineer. Long before the terms “reduce, reuse and recycle” were idiomatic, Weygers was a model of sustainable living, producing works of art, tools and machinery from salvaged objects. A scrapped dentist’s chair could become a hydraulic lift; a steel railroad track could be forged into an anvil. Weygers mentored hundreds of students in techniques of sculpture, wood engraving and toolmaking— always emphasizing the link between self-discipline and artistic freedom.

Weygers’ philosophical view was agnostic and he asserted that "Truth" was the source of life—being defined as the forces and concise designs inherent in Nature and her works. One of his students, Peter B. Partch, states that Weygers equated Nature with the concepts of deity among human cultures, and defined Nature as "the all-encompassing truth motivating all universal unseen forces, being self-governing and creating rock, plant, and animal evolution bound". Further, he relates that Weygers advocated that one should "live life to the fullest", by which he meant doing what one desires in life "for the love of it" rather than for fame or financial gain. Through living simply, and in accordance with his philosophy, each would gain the ultimate freedom possible and produce actions and works of great merit—adhering to a discipline that included learning how to continuously reduce reliance upon material needs. Weygers advocated the reuse of waste materials cast off as useless trash by contemporary societies by adapting them to other needs or making artistic creations with them. Recycling and sustainable living are the current terms for his concepts.

Alex Weygers was doubtless the most effective teacher I’ve ever known  What I learned from him, I learned by absorption:  remembering, researching, imagining, and internalizing his life as an example of human attitude and human action.  I learned that happiness, if it existed at all, lay in a process of independent, cheerful, and unremitting engagement, and that this engagement was encoded neither in love nor in struggle alone, but rather in a curious combination of both.  And he taught me this without never having said a word to that effect.  He had a silent eloquence that was available to all who knew him.  It bespoke fidelity to the creative process, cheerful but uncompromising.  It bespoke not only the valued goals of work, but the native joy of work itself.

One final note.  What I have learned from Alex and an assortment of other individuals of all dispositions, many of whom are or will be mentioned in this book, is to me the most precious and preserving of all skills: the very skill of being willing and able to learn.  This skill involves memory, alertness, concentration, tolerance,, and an overall attentiveness to the sanctity of experience.  From these attitudes we create our own morality and our own inner wealth.  As Weygers searched the lanes of Carmel Valley for items that he could convert into art, we may find sustenance and renewal in the alleys and  junkyards of memory.

Alexander Weygers

Homage to Francis Boott: Coincidence, Variety, Vividness, Romance, Loyalty, and other Begetters of Memory

Francis Boott (1813-1904) was an American who spent a long and quiet life in Boston and Florence.    He was affluent, but to all intents more interested in distributing wealth than in acquiring it.  To his alma mater Harvard, he left enough money to create a permanent endowment in the School of Music..  To his family, which at his death consisted of a single grandchild, he must have bequeathed much of what remained of his wealth.  A composer, he also left to the world a variety of songs and chorales, as well as a handful of writings.  But Boott’s real wealth lay in friendship and love. His residence in Bellosguardo became a magnet for emigré literati.  His friends included Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, William and Henry James, Isa Blagden, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, .  The villa where the Bootts resided and entertained became a feature in two of Henry James’s novels, Roderick Hudson and Portrait of a Lady.

In a letter to Boott, William James excitedly announced his new friendship with Mark Twain.  Some time later, James undertook a more solemn and challenging literary task.   His memorial address on Boott’s death in 1904 (reproduced below in Appendix Two), is one of the most thoughtful and affectionate pieces of its kind that I’ve ever read.

Portait of Francis Boott by Frank Duveneck, Sr.

Boott too had been interested in, if not consumed by, the task of perpetuating family memory.  Widowed during the 1850's, and robbed by the early death of his daughter Lizzie in 1888, he returned to America with his tiny grandson Frank.  The child’s father, painter Frank Duveneck\ (1848-1919), was far from ideally qualified for child care, much less Boott himself, so the tot was entrusted to the good offices of his uncle, Arthur Lyman, in Waltham, MA.  Boott, who hovered amicably in nearby Cambridge, made frequent visits to the Lymans.  With passing years he grew more and more impressed with the boy’s strong character and formidable intellect.  Because of this, and also because he must have been increasingly aware of his own approaching mortality, Boott gifted his grandson and posterity with two literary works: a compact autobiography (available on Amazon) and a remarkable memoir of Franky’s remarks and actions during early childhood (currently in preparation for internet publication).  It deserves to be considered a landmark in the study of child development. 

These gifts far from exhausted the family’s passion for extended memory.  Lizzie’s husband, Frank Duveneck Sr., did several paintings of his wife, an impressive portrait of Boott, and an adorable impression of Franky in early childhood.  Franky graduated Harvard, married the brilliant Josephine Whitney, emigrated to California, and with Josephine created what may be the most enduring of all the Boott family memoirs, Hidden Villa Ranch in Los Altos Hills.  This extensive property, with its Italianate villa, its youth hostel, its gardens, its working farm and wandering hill trails, would become the center for one of the most generous and unusual projects, social, cultural, and environmental, to have been undertaken in the American West.

Among their many good works, the Duvenecks added two more contributions to the trove of family memories.  In 1970 Josephine published a life of her artist father-in-law, and 8 years later she brought out her award-winning autobiography, Life on Two Levels. a book that adds much to our understanding of the Duvenecks’ life and projects.

I came to know the Duvenecks in 1965, under curious circumstances.  My friend and future wife, Michaela Paasche, who had been taken into their household as a teenager, insisted that I meet them.  Days later I found myself at the Duveneck dinner table in Hidden Villa.  Frank Jr. (Franky, now almost 80 years old) was conversing pleasantly, but I could respond only with some effort.  My attention was riveted on the painting that hung on the western wall behind him.  It was a painting of a large house, and I felt the impression that it had been somehow important in my earlier life.  It was like some ambush from the past, though in my mid-twenties I had little enough past to be ambushed by.  It turned out to be Lyman house in Waltham, owned by the same family that had taken Frank in as a toddler.  By an odd chain of events I had gotten the chance to give a kind of graduation party there in 1960, and in the course of preparing for that event I had met Frank’s aged uncle Arthur.

Thus my meeting with Frank and Josephine in 1965 was less a meeting of strangers than a convocation of memories, in which a living bond was forged out of a glimpse of a shared past.

Nick Grudin, aged 2, asks Frank Duveneck, aged 95, a question about the farm at Hidden Villa, c. 1991.PART 

THE DEPTHS OF MEMORY

Memory and Democracy: the Lost Ark

Cultural literacy is a communal vessel of remembered  values.  In terms of civil religion, it is a societal Ark of the Covenant.  I briefly addressed our loss of such values in the last section.  But we must access deep memory – that is, the history of ideas – in order to recognize the extent of the dangers we face.

Modern Western democracy developed under the influence of four major principles inherent in the late philosophical works of Cicero (106-43 BC).  These are Reason, Nature, Liberty, and Equality. From these ideas, the dialogics between them, and the historical  precedents supporting them, the American Founders were able to produce a constitutional government conformable to human security and aspiration, dependable in its preservation of order, and flexible to the inconstant contingencies of circumstance.   In addition, the Founders all spoke to a fifth Ciceronian idea that could be seen as brooding over its companions: Justice, as administered by laws.  A sixth Ciceronian principle, Duty, was less specifically addressed, perhaps because it could be derived from Reason and Justice.

These principles survived, at least rhetorically, massive external challenges and internal lapses – the Civil War, the Depression, the Japanese-American internment, etc., – into the 21st century.  But they have been challenged continually by the bugbear of American liberty: American greed.  In 2016 the forces of greed reached startling ascendancy when Donald Trump, one of the monstrous births of a weak democracy, was elected president and began filling his administration with a crew of pirates and  sycophants.  Apparently in pursuit of unbounded power, he tore into the American constitutional fabric like an Ostrogothic barbarian, in the process committing so many impeachable atrocities that only an air-headed congressional majority could keep him in office

The specific causes of Donald Trump’s rise to power included Republican weaponization of Congress and gerrymandering of state voting districts, Russia’s poisonous Internet meddling in his behalf, incessant hollering by rightist media outlets like Breitbart, Sinclair, and Fox, and the candidate’s rhetorical rabble-rousing.  But even all of these together could not have swayed an American electorate that maintained basic levels of cultural literacy and critical thinking.  But these qualities were no longer in place. The fact that the majority of Americans were dumbfounded by Trump’s victory was due not so much to their having underestimated his abilities as it was due to their having overestimated their nation’s intellectual integrity.

Remembering Lost Freedom

A sequence of ten months connecting the years 1342 and 1343 may well have been the most dramatic period in Florentine history.  It was during these months that the city was ruled, unscrupulously and often brutally, by a French appointee named Walter of Brienne, aka the Duke of Athens (1304-56).  The Florentines, who, in autumn of 1342, had entrusted Walter to relieve them from a crippling crisis of debt, were soon appalled and then infuriated by his behavior in office, and within a few months he was faced with three different conspiracies, each from a different branch of city life.  A violent revolution ensued, toppling Walter from power on July 26, 1343.  Walter managed to escape, but his henchmen were slaughtered with a malice outrageous even by Florentine standards.

The two most prominent Florentine chroniclers of these violent events, Giovanni Boccaccio ad Nicolò Machiavelli, both characterize the revolt against Walter as a reclamation of liberty lost but remembered.

Boccaccio: “Too late they [the Florentines] recognized that they had been deprived of the liberty they had known...”

Machiavelli: “Thus the indignation and hatred grew to such a degree that they would have enflamed... any servile people to recover their freedom.”

Much earlier I quoted Machiavelli’s assertion that captive republics will remember their lost liberty:

“But in republics [i.e., governments based on popular will] there is greater life, greater hatred, and more desire for vengeance; they do not and cannot cast aside the memory of their ancient liberty.”(p.  above)

It is not unlikely that Machiavelli found inspiration for this statement in Boccaccio’s life of Walter.  But influences aside, the two writers’ treatment of freedom and memory is deeply suggestive.  To those of us with freedom, nothing is easier than taking it for granted.  To those once free but now enslaved, no event has been more destructive to personal identity.  The memory of lost freedom has, if anything,  greater psychological impact than freedom itself.  This unsettling intimation suggests that freedom, typically defined as an absence of restraints, ought to be reconsidered as a precious and vulnerable presence.

.  Machiavelli evokes this presence acutely and poetically by dwelling on his city’s lost freedom of speech:

He also had the tongue of Bettone Cini cut out with such cruelty that he died of it, for having censured the assessments that were being levied on the citizens.  This increased the indignation of the citizens and their hatred of the duke, for the city was accustomed to do and to speak about everything with every license and could not bear to have its hands tied and its mouth sealed.

four centuries later, we find this very liberty, as well as others, under attack by an authoritarian force that has justified itself with little more than a barrage of lies.

Appendix One

Francis Boott’s Notes on the Character of his Grandson Franky

Why do people write?  Common-sense answers include that they tried writing and liked it – or were encouraged by the responses of their readers – or loved reading other writers and sought to emulate them, or sought fame, or simply needed money.  There’s nothing wrong with any of these explanations, nothing, that is, unless attention is turned to the wellsprings of art.  Art focuses on what concerns, and thereby defines our humanity.  Whatever else concerns them, real artists are motivated by a sense of what matters.

Francis Boott, whose grandson Franky grew up to found Hidden Villa Ranch, wrote about what mattered.  But in his case the “mattering” was strictly familial.  Boott wrote and self-published his autobiography specifically for his grandson, who passed on a copy to me more than 90 years later.  As I mentioned earlier, Boott also left, in manuscript, a journal detailing events in Franky’s childhood.

The personal motive for these writings should be clear to anybody aware of the circumstances involved.  Tragedy had deprived Francis Boott, at an advanced age, of familial continuity, leaving him a responsibility that he knew he could never live to fulfil.  He wrote and published his autobiography with the obvious purpose of preserving a fragment of that continuity.  But his journal of Franky’s childhood, concluded in 1892, went unpublished and betrayed no literary motive except the expression of a wrapt fascination with the child’s impressive character.  Here is a brief excerpt:

He is a child of a great deal of character -- reticent like both parents -- very  observant, but quietly so, the proof often appearing long afterwards.  Very independent in his views and uninfluenced by those of others, even to obstinacy -- forming his own conclusions and sticking to them.  Curiously enough, in matters of heredity, the son of two painters, he has no signs of any aptitude with a pencil and no desire for it.  He has always been an observer of works of art, statues, pictures, color.  Indeed when but one year old he noticed some small lions' heads on the cornice of the opposite house (H. Ritchie's) which none of us had observed, and called them bow-wows.  But he notices everything, whether it's art, architecture, engineering or carpentering -- indeed everything in mechanics.  Railroads, steam-engines, meter covers, drains, locks, hinges, etc -- all are objects of great interest; I, or Mr. W., said the other day, discussions of such matters amuses him more than most children are amused by toys.

A few months since he asked how steam made the cars go.  So I told him about the cylinder and the piston going in and out which he had seen.  He said he could understand that, but he did not understand how that straight motion could make the wheels go round.  So the next time we passed the R. when the train was moving I showed him the action of the crank and he was delighted, running with his arms imitating the motion.  In a clock too, he asked what made the pendulum go.  But it was not enough to tell him the weight -- he wanted to know how the weight pulling down could make the pendulum go sideways -- Lately we saw a windmill for pumping water, and I explained it was on the same principle as the crank of the steam-engine.  I asked him if he remembered how that went.  He said yes, and seemed satisfied in spite of the application of former being reversed.  His greatest hobby is water-courses, drains, dams, etc., and one might prophecy for him the profession of hydraulic engines.  But he takes great interest in flowers, trees and agriculture generally, especially in the mower, horse-rake, and kicker.--in haymaking, carting manure, with the modes of harnessing, traces, whipple-ties, etc.

Appendix Two

William James.   An address delivered at the Memorial Service to Francis Boott in the Harvard Chapel, Sunday, May 8, 1904

How often does it happen here in New England that we come away from a funeral with a feeling that the service has been insufficient. If it be purely ritual, the individuality of the departed friend seems to play too small a part in it. If the minister conducts it in his own fashion, it is apt to be too thin and monotonous, and if he were not an intimate friend, too remote and official. We miss direct discourse of simple human affection about the person, which we find so often in those lay speeches at the grave of which in France they set us nowadays so many good examples. In the case of the friend whose memory brings us together on the present occasion, it was easy to organize this supplementary service. Not everyone leaves musical compositions of his own to fill the hour with. And if we may believe that spirits can know aught of what transpires in the world which they have forsaken, it must please us all to think how dear old Francis Boott's shade must now be touched at seeing in the Chapel of this university to which his feelings clung so loyally, his music and his life at last become the subjects of cordial and admiring recognition and commemorated by so many of his neighbors. I can imagine nothing at any rate of which the foreknowledge could have given him deeper satisfaction. Shy and sensitive, craving praise as every normal human being craves it, yet getting little, he had, I think, a certain consciousness of living in the shadow. I greatly doubt whether his daydreams ever went so far as to let him imagine a service like this. Such a cordial and spontaneous outgoing towards him on our part would surprise as much as it would delight him.

His life was private in the strongest sense of the term. His contributions to literature were all anonymous, book-reviews chiefly, or letters and paragraphs in the New York Nation on musical or literary topics. Good as was their quality, and witty as was their form,—his only independent volume was an almost incredibly witty little book of charades in verse—they were too slight in bulk for commemoration; and it was only as a musical composer that he touched on any really public function. With so many of his compositions sounding in your ears, it would be out of place, even were I qualified, to attempt to characterize Mr. Boott's musical genius. Let it speak for itself. I prefer to speak of the man and friend whom we knew and whom so many of us loved so dearly.

One of the usual classifications of men is into those of expansive and those of conservative temper. The word conservative commonly suggests a dose of religious and political prejudice, and a fondness for traditional opinions. Mr. Boott was a liberal in politics and theology; and all his opinions were self-made, and as often as not at variance with every tradition. Yet in a wider sense he was profoundly conservative.

He respected bounds of ordinance, and emphasized the fact of limits. He knew well his own limits. The knowledge of them was in fact one of the things he lived by. To judge of abstract philosophy, of sculpture and painting, of certain lines of literary art, he admitted, was not of his competency. But within the sphere where he thought he had a right to judge, he parted his likes from his dislikes and preserved his preferences with a pathetic steadfastness. He was faithful in age to the lights that lit his youth, and obeyed at eve the voice obeyed at prime, with a consistency most unusual. Elsewhere the opinions of others might perplex him, but he laughed and let them live. Within his own appropriated sphere he was too scrupulous a lover of the truth not to essay to correct them, when he thought them erroneous. A certain appearance comes in here of a self-contradictory character, for Mr. Boott was primarily modest and sensitive, and all his interests and pre-occupations were with life's refinements and delicacies. Yet one's mind always pictured him as a rugged sort of person, opposing successful resistance to all influences that might seek to change his habits either of feeling or of action. His admirable health, his sober life, his regular walk twice a day, whatever might be the weather, his invariable evenness of mood and opinion, so that, when you once knew his range, he never disappointed you—all this was at variance with popular notions of the artistic temperament. He was indeed, a man of reason, no romancer, sentimentalist or dreamer, in spite of the fact that his main interests were with the muses. He was exact and accurate; affectionate, indeed, and sociable, but neither gregarious nor demonstrative; and such words as "honest," "sturdy," "faithful," are the adjectives first to rise when one thinks of him. A friend said to me soon after his death: "I seem still to see Mr. Boott, with his two feet planted on the ground, and his cane in front of him, making of himself a sort of tripod of honesty and veracity."

Old age changes men in different ways. Some it softens; some it hardens; some it degenerates; some it alters. Our old friend Boott was identical in spiritual essence all his life, and the effect of his growing old was not to alter, but only to make the same man mellower, more tolerant, more lovable. Sadder he was, I think, for his life had grown pretty lonely; but he was a stoic and he never complained either of losses or of years, and that contagious laugh of his at any and every pretext for laughter rang as free and true upon his deathbed as at any previous time of his existence.

Born in 1813, he had lived through three generations, and seen enormous social and public changes. When a carpenter has a surface to measure, he slides his rule along it, and over all its peculiarities. I sometimes think of Boott as such a standard rule against which the changing fashions of humanity of the last century might come to measurement. A character as healthy and definite as his, of whatsoever type it be, need only remain entirely true to itself for a sufficient number of years, while the outer conditions change, to grow into something like a common measure. Compared with its repose and permanent fitness to continue, the changes of the generations seem ephemeral and accidental. It remains the standard, the rule, the term of comparison. Mr. Boott's younger friends must often have felt in his presence how much more vitally near they were than they had supposed to the old Boston long before the war, to the older Harvard, to the older Rome and Florence. To grow old after his manner is of itself to grow important.

I said that Mr. Boott was not demonstrative or sentimental. Tender-hearted he was and faithful as few men are, in friendship. He made new friends, and dear ones, in the very last years of his life, and it is good to think of him as having had that consolation. The will in which he surprised so many persons by remembering them—"one of the only purely beautiful wills I have ever read," said a lawyer,—showed how much he cared at heart for many of us to whom he had rarely made express professions of affection.

Good-by, then, old friend. We shall nevermore meet the upright figure, the blue eye, the hearty laugh, upon these Cambridge streets. But in that wider world of being of which this little Cambridge world of ours forms so infinitesimal a part, we may be sure that all our spirits and their missions here will continue in some way to be represented, and that ancient human loves will never lose their own.



Appendix Three.  The Capture and Care of Present Time

The cult of Mnemosyne, of which I admit to be a member, is based on a cognitive and emotional paradox.  Most of us, it would seem, regard memory passively, like audiences at a drama that recurrently evokes delight and desire, or remorse and dread.  Others, more aggressively, seek to memorialize the present by engaging it with a kind of appreciative valor.  Such was the attitude of Francis Boott, who, knowing that his tiny grandson would grow up as an orphan, strove to provide the boy with a small but supportive family of words to sustain his future.  Though few of us will be situated as dramatically as Mr. Boott, his efforts suggest the maxim that, in order to cultivate memory authentically, we must love, respect, and preserve present time.

Diary of a Solo Parent June-July, 1987 

Alhough I knew nothing of the Boott journal until 2015, I had attempted a not wholly different project in the summer of 1987, when my wife, beneficiary of an academic grant that took her far away, left me to mind the family for several weeks.  Though the journal that emerged has no stylistic merit, it is freighted with human detail; and it is this detail, this quasi-photograhic recounting of household events, that awakens my memory whenever I focus on a page.  It can be said that this sort of narrative, honestly if imperfectly pursued, can stop time, temporarily relieving us of the sense of loss that comes inevitably with age.  But in an obligingly paradoxical sense, such narratives can redeem time, awakening us to constants that apply through the present from past until future.  

This diary records domestic events during the 40 days of my wife Michaela’s attendance at a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar in Storrs, Connecticut.  I decided to keep the diary for a number of reasons:  to give myself something to do during morning writing sessions that are too short for anything else, to inform my wife about what was going on, to relieve myself of stress and loneliness, and to preserve what is otherwise lost for ever, the mood and sequence and detail of a single period of family life. 

Ages:  Anthony 11, Nick 8, Teddy 4, Robert 49

Bo, The Labrador Retriever

June 15, 1987 

Micha woke up yesterday morning to find a child on each side of her in bed, a third on his way upstairs.  I took her to the plane at 8, with her ton of baggage, including the trusty telephone, which set off the X-ray alarm at the ticket gate.     

I came home and took the boys to a consolation breakfast, croissanwiches and hashbrowns and orange soda, at the Burger King near the Millrace.  Then we all went cherry-picking on the hill above our house.  In a thick meadow near a cherry tree Bo found a huge pile of crap, presumably human, and started rolling around in it, with such results as to be unpresentable at home. 

When we get back, I lock Bo out of house and garage and he promptly runs away.  Teddy, who has only picked at his croissanwich, demands food and, doing a little smartass step in stockinged feet on his way to the table, slips and bangs his mouth on a chair.  Crying, he wails, "Call Mama!"  Bleeding lips, teeth still sore a day later. Anthony and Nick return and are allowed to watch tv with Ted as therapy for the injured. 

Bo returns out of nowhere, evades my efforts to hose him down.  Later I will corner him and swab him with a wet diaper. 

At one Nigel, Nick's friend, shows up, and while I chat with his mother by her car, Teddy (now revived), runs through his repertoire of death-defying stunts in the front yard.  Nigel and Nick go off to play.  The rest of us watch the Celtics getting beat by the Lakers in Game 6 of the NBA Finals.  Teddy falls asleep, and must be woken at 4, so that we all may race off to Nick's piano recital.  Aunt Eloise calls from New York, and is limited to fifteen minutes of complaints. While Nick performs (with Anthony as audience), Teddy and I shop for dinner (spaghetti).  Back at home, the sauce simmers, and everyone has gotten ravenous again.  Anthony and Nick partake of the watermelon I have brought;  but Teddy's teeth hurt, and he must wait for the pasta. As dinner is being prepared and served, my mother phones, Annalise appears with her friend Dan and much baggage on her way to San Diego, and Micha calls.  The kids tear into the spaghetti.  Dinner is over about an hour late. 

I read Teddy a book and then play cards with Nick, while Anthony enjoys his new privilege of tv after dinner.  Micha calls again.  Her room at the University of Connecticut is minimalist:  metal bunk, no furniture to speak of.  The meadow she was supposed to look out on is asphalt and has cars and traffic lights. 

Teddy refuses to go to sleep (apparently rested by his nap).  As he has become whack-repellent, I lock him in his room.  After an hour, he proves irrepressible.  10 pm finds him, me and an insomniac Anthony eating spaghetti.  Teddy puts what he can't eat in the fridge, along with his glass of water.  Of his own will, he goes downstairs and finally falls asleep. 

I look at what is left of the evening movie.  Ralph Nickleby is hanging himself;  the scene shifts to a mass wedding, and that's that.  I tidy up a little in the kitchen, then wind down, watching something about apes.  In bed by midnight. 

 

June 17, 1987.  Wednesday 

Half way through the first week.  The children are not seeming lonely, at least not 'positively' lonely in the sense of being depressed or saying that they miss their mom.  But when the phone rings at seven, they are quickly at hand, and last night Teddy fetched Nick a lively blow when Nick would not give up the phone.  It is 2:20 PM and I am thinking about what to make for dinner.  Steak, maybe;  but if so I should have been defrosting what we have.  A Major Mishap seemed to be occurring last night, when the refrigerator made an incessant low groan and everything inside started warming up.  But it all seems better now that a repairman has put in a new timer. 

Monday and Tuesday were up and down for me.  On Monday I sold the Volvo station wagon, which more or less sees to the basic summer finances.  On Tuesday I got a form-letter type rejection from U of Chicago Press.  Neither ups nor downs seem to affect family life, which imposes its own exclusive necessities.  These necessities include, first of all, keeping actively involved with everything -- cooking, sorting clothes, dressing people, cleaning, granting permissions, shopping, picking up, dropping off, etc. -- and such involvement does not let up from morning well into the night.  Today and the next three will perhaps be most challenging of all.  School ended yesterday, and Annelise won't return till Sunday.  Ann Rogers comes during the afternoon, but only for three hours or so. 

Yesterday I took Teddy to the dentist.  The two front teeth were slightly loose ("mobile" in dentistise) but would firm up again. Dentist Keith found a large blood blister under Teddy's upper lip. 

Last night after dinner we tried a new idea that failed.  The idea was a jaunt that would wrap up the day and get Teddy, who on Micha's departure became a late-nighter, tired.  Big dinner (last of the spaghetti), three bikes loaded on jeep, family cruises down to the river trail.  But Anthony's bike has a busted tire.  We return via ice cream store and thence to Washburn Park, where much ice cream is eaten and the rest dribbles over Teddy's jacket.  Back at home, after his bath, Teddy is hungry again, eating more pasta.  Then he asks for dessert.  Finally he sleeps at nine. 

Tuesday my first good night of sleep. 

 

June 18, 1987.  Thursday 

Anthony left for the Clark Creek outing yesterday, and now at 2 I have an hour before picking him up on his return.  Lots of beaming kids went to Clark Creek, and parents in kidlike moods.  It looked like fun. 

Earlier I had taken Teddy to the EMU daycare (dustclouds from construction not having materialized) and Nick to Roo Nicholson's house in the bush south of 27th.  When I picked him up 2 hours later, Nick had gotten in with a few neighbor girls and was running a cherry stand on one of the dirt roads near by.  Later, as though in need of some Anthony-like outing, he got himself invited to the McCarthy's for the night.  

These days I am much into chores.  The chore looming at present is the sliding door to the laundry room.  The door is off its rollers and somehow has to be fixed so that the kids can use laundry room as dressing room modestly after Annelise shows up.  Laundry room must be used as dressing room so that clean clothes do not have to go to bedroom dressers and dirty clothes do not have to come up from hampers.  So far it is working.  But I need another adult to help me remove the door. 

Many abdominal rumblings since the flu and now some abdominal pain.  Is it the pressure?  Or the kick Anthony gave me two Sundays ago?  Probably it is that the sulfa knocked out all the friendy bacteria in my intestines, which then began to decline.  I have taken to acidophilous. 

 

June 19, 1987.  Friday 

2pm again -- the hour Ann is relieving me this week.  All but staggered into my office just now, done in.  Anthony presently with a headache, Nick at loose ends, Teddy throwing a tantrum.  Last night went well enough.  I told A & N the second half of an Alan Quartermain story;  Nick told Teddy a story.  Only problem:  T had refused to eat his sausage steak potato dinner.  So I gave him nothing and locked him up.  Later he emerged and ate some.  The same thing worked this morning with a nectarine.  T's willfulness is just a front;  basically he is flexible, and learns. 

Today's problems defy narration and are better expressed in lists. On this lovely June day, Anthony 

derided, bitched against and intimidated Nick on every occasion, 

prowled the house, muttering, 

would not eat much breakfast and then immediately asked for snacks,      refused to eat the snack (peanuts) I brought on our noon bikeride; 

Nick 

walked around all day as in a dream, 

burst into tears whenever thwarted by me, 

would not eat much breakfast and then immediately asked for snacks; 

incessantly tried to phone friends who were not at home; 

Teddy 

resisted letting people dress him 

took a large shovelful of dirt and dumped it on Bo, who promptly ran into the house to clean himself off, 

took the lawn sprinkler and soaked Anthony with it,  

kept asking for ice cream. 

The NYT Book Review, read yesterday, advertised the heartwarming "father's diary of a one-month holiday with his children" Father to the Man).  A lark on Martha's Vineyard or somewhere.  Probably has girls. 

  

June 22, 1987.  Monday 

Today's schedule of events:  Teddy to visit the Stevenses at 10:30 and to be picked up and brought back to Annelise by 3.  Nick to be tested for the Talented & Gifted program at 10, Edison School; to be picked up by 10:50, then to play at our house with Patrick Williams from 11 to 3, then to be taken to Amazon Pool by Maureen Williams. Anthony to Luke Helms' birthday party at 11.  So, after picking up the house, I put them all in the car.  We drop Nick off at Edison School.  Then we go to Safeway to get cash.  Anthony remembers he has not RSVP'd the Helms invitation.  He does so by phone and discovers that they are taking him to Dorena Lake.  All this without telling parents.  I start cautioning him about this and that, wishing I could just tell him not to go.  On the way to the Stevens', we hit the Oasis for dinner supplies and a snack.  Teddy is dropped off.  Anthony and I drive up to the Wegelins' to deliver a book.  We get to Edison at 10:50 and find Nick being released by Carmen, his examiner.  They are both in fine moods, and Carmen tells us that he is a bright boy and has done well. Moment of joy.   

I take Anthony to the Helms', which I find equipped with two Suburbans and a pit bull.  The Helms assure me that the lake is shallow and relatively safe.  Nick and I drive up to the Williams', where we pick up Patrick and his assorted baseball and swimming gear.  I take them back to the house and lie down on the couch.  Annelise appears, and in an obscure hesitant way informs me that unless I don't immediately get into the car and find $70 to loan her for summer school books, her youthful prospects will be dealt a killer blow.  I drive down and get the money.  I come back and make Nick and Patrick tuna sandwiches for lunch.  Later, while the boys play, I lie down on the upper deck.  The sun is intense, filling.  My heart-rate slows to 35, my mind plummets into darkness. 

Now it is past 4.  Annelise and Teddy are safe at home.  Nick is at Amazon Park.  Anthony should be back from Dorena.  I am going to jog and swim. 

 

June 23, 1987.  Tuesday 

After a great night of sleep, I gaze on the warm bar of light at the edge of the curtains and feel ready to face the day.  Last night wasn't easy.  Arriving home at 6 after the jog and the swim, I realized that I had forgotten to pick up Nick at the Williams'.  This was then accomplished, but when I got back, Teddy had gotten a blow in the sore teeth from Anthony's knee while trying to bite him.  Micha had called during the screaming and despair and wanted to be called back for a damage report.  Somehow my weak point in this whole venture, the one item that can turn me from something resembling a father into an abject freak, is Teddy's front teeth.  They are just baby teeth (he is 4); and they will probably be ok anyway, but injuries to them uncork in me a depthless pain -- dating to when, about 4 years old myself, I had knowingly demolished my most precious toy -- about the impermanence of things.  The storm passes, as does Teddy's discomfort.  Somehow, though I lay out dinner at 6:30, I cannot get Teddy into his bed til 8.  He must be getting up too late in the morning.  At 8:45 I hear thumpings downstairs and find the other two in Teddy's room.  T has taken the casing off his radio and (apparently while the thing was still turned on) dissected it into 150 pieces.  Most of the pieces are the tabs with little numbers that are supposed to flip over to tell you the time of day.  Older boys get whacks.  I collect the wreckage and dump it in the garbage bag.  Children go to their rooms.  In Nick's rooms are noticeable little glimmers from the rug.  N has been shooting 4mm. staples.  

Things quiet down.  As I sit in front of the TV eating old pizza and gulping beer, Annelise's boyfriend Dan is down to see her and back up again, a practice which must cease.  Micha, who has now called three times, is concerned about this;  and I speak to Annelise about it when she comes up.  Anthony tiptoes upstairs, greets me as "big man" (this refers ironically to my having spanked him) and kisses me goodnight.  

This evening's movie is a monument to love called THE ENCHANTED COTTAGE.  Robert Young is a disfigured war hero.  Dorothy Maguire is a plain jane housekeeper.  But they are both beautiful because they love each other. At 7AM I hear Anthony and Nick rushing around here and there and whispering excitedly.  It is the first day of Summer Sports Camp, their seasonal occupation.  Today is special, and everyone, including parents and anyone parents are taking care of, must be at B-54 Gerlinger Annex by 9 sharp, for an essential orientation meeting.  At 7:40 I crawl out of bed, win a round with the bathroom, get dressed and hit the kitchen to make grilled cheese on English.  Wails of grief and agony from below.  I now suffer from, and sometimes indulge, the perverse impulse not to investigate wails of grief and agony.  I go downstairs and find that the scene of battle is Nick's bedroom.  Somehow that obscene carcase of a radio has reemerged, and Teddy has just gotten from it A BLOW IN THE FRONT TEETH.  You cannot imagine a more unhappy little boy.  Nick is to blame for digging it out of the garbage, and I vow punishment -- but not wanting Nick to become the world's most miserable boy, I make punishment in the future.  Breakfast proceeds, interrupted by occasional recriminations between T and N, and semi-human warnings from me.  I make oatmeal for Teddy, to save him pain.  Annelise appears, sits down at the table silently, and starts sewing.  She is sewing a patch on her pair of red jeans, for these days patches on jeans are almost as stylish as jagged rips showing bare flesh.  Her sitting down is ok, for I have let her know that I will handle breakfasts;  but when she asks me to bring her honey for the coffee, it is too much and I tell her so quietly but nastily.  Teddy's teeth unaccountably recover, and he starts demanding grilled cheese. It is suddenly almost time to go.  T announces impending bowel movement.  He heads for the bathroom, from which grunts of prolonged effort begin to emerge.  Anthony and Nick run around the house hiding, jumping out and shouting BOO! at each other.  We are running 5, maybe 10 minutes late for orientation.  In the car, with all of them finally aboard, I light up a foul but bracing Maltese cheroot. 

At the orientation meeting, held in a big gym, a horde of parents sit anxiously in the stands looking down at the participating kids, who are arranging on the floor in age-determined groups, and listening to the Sports Camp Supervisor, whose discussion of things, over a bad PA system, bears less resemblance to spoken English than to the amplified squeals of a suckling pig.  As the children file out to their various activities, parents ask each other what has gone on, where children are to be picked up, where dropped off.  I have been sitting on the floor with Teddy, whose mood has skyrocketed into wild enthusiasm.  Together we head for the EMU childcare center.  He says he is cold, and I wrap him in my sweater and carry him.  After dropping T off, on my way to my office, I pass a coffee shop.  The odds are that a croissant and coffee will strengthen me.  But when I have laid these items on the counter in front of the lady, I discover that I have no money. 

 

June 24, 1987.  Wednesday 

Ten days into it, thirty to go.  I could not feel it at the time, but Annelise's arrival on Sunday has changed things for the better.  She is a good person, all the kids love her, and the three hours she gives on weekdays (3-6;  5 hours on weekends) have brought me rest and exercise which are beginning to lessen my fatigue. 

Teddy's schedule at the EMU daycare, which had been 8:30-12, is being lengthened to 8:30-2:45 -- to reduce strain on him and the rest of us.  Predictably, at age 4, he is the chief source of static in the family, involving himself in fearful ways in everybody else's business. But with his peers he is almost angelic. 

Micha called yesterday to tell me that she has begun her first article! Anthony is home with a sore throat today.  Small worry there, he is strong as an ox.  But we have to keep it away from Teddy, who had two ear infections in the late spring and is still hard of hearing from fluid. 

Yesterday pm went happily, especially at noon, when I picked up A and N and we sat on a lawn and lunched on bologna, hamburger rolls and a huge bottle of pop. 

Nick played with matches in his room last night;  I found him out by the smell. 

Teddy last night dreamt that Micha was home.  He came looking for her in the morning and was sad.  I got him to cook breakfast with me. 

 

June 25, 1987.  Thursday 

Clear days, high 80s, grass drying but everything else full and healthy, profound blue skies.  At 9 am, having all in order, I sit in my still-shady office, listening to Mozart's A major piano concerto. Another good day with the kids.  Nick absent, having visited Nigel yesterday and stayed the night.  Teddy in a good mood but refusing proper food at proper times -- this kept him up til 9 last night, for my response was Good food or no food.  We woke him early this morning. But good food last night was a problem.  My triumphant Tuesday clam chowder (Mo's frozen base x 2, fortified with part of a 6 lb tin of chopped clams, onions and diced potatoes) satisfied Anthony and the rest of us, but not Teddy.  Teddy wanted Carnation Malted Milk, which he said was "deelishious and not a dessert".  Then there was Mildred's casserole.  Mildred Wasserman had appeared on a mission of mercy sometime yesterday and left a casserole covered in foil.  Pasta and cheese.  Turned out to be totally tasteless, with the consistency of a wrestling mat.  I tried to get the kids to eat it.  I shouldn't have. Also I shouldn't have drowned the salad in dressing.  Everything in family life demands precision.  

I am rebuilding myself with sleep, vitamins and sports.  A fast, hot bike ride by the river yesterday.  I now feel fairly strong, with reserves of patience and cheer.  But depression lingers in a lack of desire to write anything except this journal and in a pathological interest in the mail. 

 

June 26, 1987 

Checked at the bank just now.  Balance $69.12 in the red.  Must have been caught by some delayed-action check. 

The EMU daycare is disappearing under a cloud of construction dust.  Especially bad this week, with temperatures now in the 90s and little or no moisture at night.  I left Teddy there anyway for the morning and told the staff to keep the kids in when it got bad.  I called two physical plant supervisors and asked them for more watering.  And I still feel guilty. 

After Nick and Anthony showed up at my office yesterday noon, we drove out of town on Coburg Road, stopped to pick up a Col. Sanders special (the 20-nugget box bountifully contained 23), and chanced to end up at Armitage Park, munching chicken and french fries and drinking pop at a picnic table next to the McKenzie River.  Beautiful day, kids wholly content.  Then we stopped at Johnson's Farm and bought two boxes of raspberries, one of blueberries and one of boysenberries.  They finished off the blueberries in the car, and by dinner time not a single berry of any sort remained uneaten, except two raspberries which met a different fate, one being rubbed into N's hair by A, and vice versa. 

Analise told me last night that her first impression of the kids, as intelligent and somewhat unruly and discontent, had altered with experience.  They are at ease with her, and apparently sweeter with her alone than they are when both of us are home.  Annelise is an ex-student of mine, who became available for service when, after 4 years at the U of O, she discovered that somehow she still needed 16 credits for graduation.  Her remarkable easiness with kids and her success in dealings with them derive from a sanguine temperament, childhood in a family of 9, and uncommon physical beauty.  She is tall, blond, blue-eyed and graceful as a young palm tree.  She is completely unself-conscious, so that her charms are heightened by a startling openness and readiness of response.  No wonder the kids follow her everywhere. 

Last night's dinner:  hot dogs.  Last night's story to Teddy: part 2 of the talking bicycle.  Last night's story to Nick:  the Palamino Rat, a foundling who makes good.  Rat, a tiny shapeless mass, is "collected" by power-pole dwelling crow, together with a few other odds and ends, and dumped with all sorts of bricabrac in crow's nest.  Crow holds him up, says "What's this?", wife replies "Too early to tell.  Wait till it sprouts hair."  Recognized as a rat, hero is abandoned in a field.  In heavy rain, ground gives way, rat falls into gopher's house.  Gopher's shocked at first, but rat endears himself by doing odd jobs.  Gopher dies while rat is still adolescent.  Finds his way to a meadow and sneaks a view of rabbit family eating everything in sight;  appears before them pushing huge turnip as diplomatic gift. Succeeds with rabbits at first, later expelled in sibbling rivalry.  By this time his beautiful palamino coat is in, and he is adopted by a farmer as a pet. 

 

June 29, 1987.  Monday 

Weekend Three:  The third weekend was hot.  Sprinklers going all over the garden.  Saturday, after a fairly nasty breakfast, we went off and bought fireworks, A and N $2.50 worth apiece of their own choice, T two boxes, count 50 each, of whippersnappers, tiny bombs made of gravel and silver fulminate which implode on impact.  At home, Anthony and Nick start rubbing same into each other's hair, and there are two hours to go before Annelise takes over.  I load three bikes onto the jeep, two on the rack and A's on top (my bike has a baby seat on it), we grab our two available helmets, take off down the hill.  Turning right onto Agate off 17th, Anthony's bike falls off the jeep.  Jeep resounds with moans and howls as I run out and hoist it back on top. At the parking lot near the Autzen footbridge, we make preparations. Bikes come down, helmets are fitted.  As I begin to take off with Teddy on the bar in front of me, Anthony makes some bitter complaint and I almost fall off.  Moment of excitement for T as we coast under the railroad overpass.  Behind I hear a crash.  Anthony groans again.  In the distance we see the fallen Nick, sitting on the path being tended by the young women whom he was trying to avoid when he skidded.  N has lost half the skin off his left knee, with a couple of deeper gashes, and he is very miserable.  It is no easy thing just getting everyone plus equipment back to the jeep, and when I start it up, the bike starts to fall off the top again.  Later, after N's knee has been cleaned and bandaged, I buy and install a front rack, so that we can carry four bikes. 

The mail brings from Micha a musical teddy bear which immediately becomes T's favorite object. 

When Annelise begins her work at 1, I am at loose ends.  I have looked forward madly to this moment, but now what shall I do?  Anthony says goodbye and heads on foot for a waterfight at University Park.  I want to get out but feel I have nowhere to go.  The office?  To get railroad ties for the garden?  A depressed indecision.  In the jeep it occurs to me, via a hollow qualm, that Anthony may need me, so I look for him, and do not find him till he is almost at the park.  The rest of the afternoon a bunch of errands with a street-jog sandwiched in. 

The evening meal:  a wonderful silver salmon, with secret formula mashed potatoes.  T's story:  talking bike, III (bike supplanted by car, takes revenge).  It does not put T to sleep, almost does me. 

Sunday AM:  morning treat, this time at the Original Pancake House.  The kids are happy with their stacks and four flavors of syrup, and I drink much weak coffee.  Day is heating up.  We drive then to Payless to get big bandages for Nick (where T gets a ride on a horse machine), and then, exercising rights vested in me, I tell them over objections that we are going to Ken Kesey's ranch (about ten miles up country) to return two books he loaned me.  The ride, esp. the 2 miles on Ridgeway Road, is beautiful, and at Kesey's they see a fabulous parrot, some llamas and the grand living room in K's barn-house.  T tries to communicate with parrot using musical teddy bear.  Shown around by Connie, who lives there and owns the llamas.  As we drive home, I have sharp desire to move to the country, where the kids will not be on top of each other but rather can expand into space.  But would they? 

Still Sunday AM:  Nick walks down to Patrick's, and with an hour of duty left I take A and T to Pay-n-Pac to buy summer equipment.  A cooler, and two gadgets which will provide hours of fun and terror:  a slimline telephone (Teddy will try to call Micha on it again and again) and, God help me, a car- and window-washing device called something like Turbobuster.  This device turns an ordinary garden hose into a lethal weapon, and can with alarming accuracy project a cloud of suds to points twenty-five feet away.  All this, soap included, for $14.99. In the jeep, Anthony fantasizes about starting a car-wash business up at Daniel Cassell's, but deep down he sees in Turbobuster the ultimate toy.  Back home we cover the Mercedes with suds, and everyone wants a turn, all at once.  Small scuffles break out as the death-dealing jet dances here and there.  Bo hides in the garage and barks.  Telling everyone to stand back for their own safety, I go down into the woods and aim at the living room windows above.  Power on!  A loud snap tells me that I have lost the little red Powernozzle, probably into orbit.  I look up, waiting for it to fall on me, but nothing falls on me except soap and water.  Even without the nozzle, though, Turbobuster does an excellent job of washing the inaccessible windows. 

All this excitement and activity eats well into Annelise's time. She begins her hours with the boys, which will be peaceful.  I jog in the great heat and do some shopping.  Then home and more puttering about.  Dinner is cold salmon, more potatoes, and a salad, following by an almost endless succession of nectarines.  In the evening a walk with Teddy and Nick along one of the wild cherry routes.  Yet even at midnight and with two scotches, I do not feel sleepy. 

Now it is nearly noon Monday, and A nd N are about to appear in my office after sports camp.  I was prepared to pull Teddy out of the EMU today, but they assured me that the kids would only be outside till 10:30.  Breakfast of eggs and toast (I had salmon, which the kids do not adore) went ok.  Nick amazingly sorted the wash while I was in the shower.  I am getting up earlier these days, because I cannot do the chores and chatter with the kids at once, and the chatter is essential. 

 

June 30, 1987.  Tuesday 

I took Anthony and Nick yesterday to Dairy Queen, where they ordered blizzards and I a milkshake, all very refreshing as we drove off down the valley in the heat to buy railroad ties for the garden. On the way back we stopped at the Oasis for food, a satisfying venture for them in that they convinced me to buy puffy-looking oatmeal bread and order a fat you-cook-it pizza (half vegetarian for Annelise), together with the nectarines I wanted.  We stopped at Safeway for dishsoap, Grape Nuts Flakes (now a favorite), soda pop and popsicles.  The rest of the afternoon a flurry of errands and chores (I bought airline vouchers for a trip of my own, perhaps Antigua, in December, and ended up cutting railroad ties and installing one);  the evening quite peaceful, except for Teddy, who was outraged at being put to bed and quietly took his room to pieces.  At 9 he called to me and with the comment, "Don't want this any more," handed me a strange wooden item which turned out to be the base of a music box which had once been decorated with the wooden figure of a dancing Cossack.  

This morning at 6 am Teddy appears in my bed.  "I dreamed of Mama, in an old car, in the back seat, driving."  (Yesterday he climbed upstairs pathetically in the early am, announcing "I heared Mama's voice.")  Then he wrestles with me as I talk to Micha on the phone. These calls, morning and evening, are the only luxury of the summer, and even at that they are getting too expensive.  Teddy:  "Why do bellies hurt when they have no food in them?  Do they hurt for popsicles?"  Later I doze as T goes off with blankets and a nectarine to watch the news.  The news, he returns to inform me, has told him to have a soda pop. 

Morning Tuesday:  

shower & shave & dress 

clean kitchen counters 

empty dishwasher 

set out Grapenuts Flakes for kids (simple today) 

take mammouth vitamin pill 

make coffee & drink some with a nectarine for breakfast 

wash clothes 

dry clothes (detailed to Anthony, but I forgot to turn on dryer) 

dress Teddy, who struggles as usual 

make my bed 

feed Bo & change his water 

water south end of front garden 

put out garbage for garbage man 

shut Bo in garage so he won't attack garbage man 

check air in bike tires 

remount rear bike rack & put bike on it 

clean up after breakfast  

look for envelope containing airline vouchers (which I have   already misplaced)  

straighten hall rugs 

check downstairs for lights left on 

brush teeth 

medicate sore finger 

bus breakfast dishes 

decide issues including whether N's knee is fit for swimming, who gets to play with wooden toys, what to do when they won't stop fighting with each other 

take along extra checks (which I forgot)  

grab wallet, keys and the New English Bible, which I need for the office 

close screen doors 

remember to bring half-smoked cigar 

get T into his safety seat in jeep 

drop off A and N (fresh as daisies) at sports camp 

drop off T at daycare (no dust in sight, but can he have peanut butter?) 

drive to Springfield, smoking cigar and listening to music, to 

drop off jeep at radiator shop  

bike 25 minutes back to office 

Things to Remember:  pick up paychecks, forge M's endorsement, 

deposit the things, pick up new office bookcase 

Why the details?  Philip Marlowe once asked that question and answered it by remarking that in an emotionally charged and hence distracting situation, one's path through life must be followed with ultra-deliberate attention.  For parents, attention to detail is necessary for similar reasons.  Almost every family interaction, no matter how everyday (and especially when it involves more than two family members), is emotionally charged or carries the potential to become so in a split second.  One is punished for assuming the opposite, for trying to relax when kids seem quiet;  being a parent and refusing to lead is like being in the water and refusing to swim.  Every child carries his own agenda, both explicit, in terms of plans and needs, and implicit, in terms of automatic response to generic events like competition or criticism or instruction.  Parents have got to be aware of these.  Every child needs to be taught every day that family life is not a miscellaneous series of events but an enterprise projecting into the future.  Parents have got to keep in mind what they and their child should be doing next.  This providence keeps parents a step ahead, and being a step ahead is the gentlest form of authority.  On top of this is the fact that if we do not keep up with details we will land in disgusting messes. 

But what about detail in this diary?  Philip Marlowe's boss, Raymond Chandler, saw in detail the centerpiece of a literary craft that went back to Homer.  Chandler's remarkable use of detail -- to suggest character or set tone, to condemn or celebrate the palpable universe -- must have been what prompted the classicist Peter Levi to remark that Chandler and Hemingway might well have been the only modern writers capable of translating Herodotus.  But viewing specificity simply as a literary device begs the question of what detail means to us psychologically in the first place.  I use detail to suggest the complexity, stress, irony and danger involved in being the parent of three active children.  More generally, respect for detail suggests the survival of the natural, even feral, alertness that would have been essential in to human beings in earlier cultures.  It is a kind of self-respect as well, not only for this reason but also because self-respecting people never underestimate the importance of whatever situation they happen to be in. 

Now it is 4, and I am preparing to bike back to Springield for the jeep.  Let us hope that it will now run cool as a pickle, so that our trip to California will not be interrupted (as it was two years ago) by automotive fainting spells and tense waits by the roadside in 100 F. 

 

July 1, 1987.  Wednesday 

Cloudy this morning, but they say it will break up.  A healing sleep last night.  Have been rising around 7 in order to get the jump on them.  But this promptness has its drawbacks.  If everybody is fed and picked up and ready by 8, what do they do from 8 to 8:30?  One brilliant plan has developed -- brilliant precisely because no one planned it -- of paying Anthony and Nick to babysit Teddy.  This brings the kids into peaceful contact and gives A & N a sense of goal and consequence.  Today it worked from 7:50 to 8:20, but the last 10 minutes (when no one was getting paid) were ragged. 

Now in July at least we can figure the time until M's return by simple subtraction.  Yesterday she called from Storrs and wondered whether to come back for this weekend, which had for her suddenly become a three-day one.  It would mean two days of travel, $500, and for all its fun, another parting.  Probably instead she will visit my brother and parents in Vermont. 

Anthony spent yesterday afternoon at the golf course, finding balls and selling them to golfers. 

After all my biking yesterday, the evening was pretty peaceful.  I made hamburgers for them, just as they like hamburgers, fried in olive oil/Madeira/soy sauce/garlic, on English muffins, with mustard and catsup and pickles.  The two older boys sank towards sleep in profound content.  Teddy, as on Monday, was more active.  This time he found some charcoal art implement and did up his walls and door with it. Given the previous state of walls and door in that room (what with T's earlier decorations and Nick having thrown a chair right into the wall -- hear the wind, Papa? -- and having gone at the doorjamb with a screwdriver), this new work of mischief was comparatively tame, and it somehow satisfied him.  Upstairs again, I turned on the stereo in the living room and went to the kitchen for my solitary meal.  I ravined down a couple of large burgers to the tune of William Schuman's AMERICAN ANTHEM.  The ANTHEM ought not to be heard by people who are eating.  Intended as a tribute to the American spirit, it sounds instead like a large mixed chorus being subjected, simultaneously and from the rear, to a succession of unnatural acts.  Softer music came on after dinner as I sat on the couch.  Until last night I had been watching TV movies after dinner, but this time I just sat.  I had a glass of cheap sherry. I don't mean $5.99 cheap, I mean $.99 cheap. When I bought it at the local distressed food store, I had wondered what could have brought a corked-bottle name-brand sherry ("Bel Arbres Hearthside Cream Sherry") to such disrepute.  The answer was that it had little flavor and no sweetness.  As after a sip or two I grew sleepier (this wine, taken after bicycling to and from East Springfield, has magical soporific qualities), I wondered what had gone wrong.  Maybe the hearth wasn't warm enough that year.  Maybe French grammarians had conjoined under a full moon to put a curse on the California winemaker who had dared to coin the phrase "Bel Arbres". Maybe the great Faerie Santa Anna, who can bestow at will either renewing warmth and killing heat, was not invited to the vintner's daughter's wedding.  When I opened my eyes again, it was 11 and I was late for bed. 

T's story last night:  Betsy and the hero teddy bear.  T a remarkably attentive and concentrated boy.  The weekend Micha left, we four went to a garage sale, where for 10 cents I bought T a pair of used velcro training shoes.  I glued them up as best I could, washed and dried them.  T couldn't wait to get them on.  I think what especially endeared them to him was that he could, for the first time, put on and take off his own shoes.  Since then he has treated them with the sort of care that is rare in a four-year-old.  He refuses stubbornly to walk in mud and makes long detours around suspect patches of landscape.  Yesterday in the bathroom he knocked down a bottle of Listerine, trying to wash them.  

July 2, 1987.  Thursday 

The monster weekend approaches.  Annelise leaves for a wedding in Rogue River tomorrow, not to return till Sunday.  Julie Williamson will help out tomorrow morning.  Saturday, the 4th, will feature a barbacue at the Williams' (the only thing our wild bunch has been invited to since Micha left) and then the Williamses and others will come up in the evening for fireworks.  Under the rather explosive circumstances, I must watch Teddy like a hawk. 

Now (actually on the 4th) we are halfway through the six weeks.  The last three days suggest the following pluses and minuses: 

PLUSES: 

Some aspects of the house are actually going better than before. The recycling system in the laundry room (kids wear one set of clothes, deposit them when dirty in washer, take clean clothes out of nearby basket -- one wash done daily) is barbaric but has simplified everything.  Children -- even Teddy this morning -- are picking up their own rooms, taking care of each other, obeying most parental requests immediately.  No really savage fighting.  On the other side, my discipline is easier than M's, with at least one treat a day, less sternness about TV, more leeway on types of food eaten -- though less about snacking and messing up the kitchen.  Children willingly eat healthy things, knowing that they will also get their favorites.  The fact that I am concentrating on being a father, rather than dividing time as father and husband, has got to make a difference.  Children are physically strong, alert, not depressed.  I am no longer edgy and overstressed, and thanks to Annelise I feel that my days have some freedom.  I am becoming a better parent, as anyone must become, who has to be both father and mother. 

MINUSES:  Conjugal loneliness, esp. during the evening hours, when I am at loose ends.  General inability, partly because of my limited office day, to work on anything besides this journal.  Lack of anyone to talk with.  An impoverished attitude toward time, i e, wishing time to pass so that M will return. 

Yesterday Anthony and Nick ACTUALLY REQUESTED a trip to Johnson's Farm for berries at lunch time.  Never before have they shown appreciation for such quiet family fun.  Part of this, probably, was due to my strategy of left-handedly guiding them into edifying situations without saying anything that could be interpreted as moral. Not that this always works.  Yesterday I tried to get them to help me set railroad ties as garden steps, and I lost Anthony almost immediately.  Nick hung on and earned a quarter. 

Dinner last night:  poker sandwiches, so called because they are what I serve when I host my poker group.  Anthony presided.  T preferred yogurt and jam, but had a sandwich later.  T's story:  the hero bear actually the witch-enchanted son of an 18th-century toymaker (cribbed from E T A Hoffmann). 

Today, as a weekly treat, A & N get to go to the comic book store after sports camp, where I will meet them. 

Dustmaking has stopped at the construction site near T's daycare.  After my calls, the university got on their backs.  They washed down the street, cellophaned their heaps of earth and stepped up their spraying. 

 

July 3, 1987.  Friday 

Society has closed down today, and since I didn't want to leave all three with an inexperienced sitter, I took Anthony and Nick on a jaunt that included a visit to Mr. Brennan's wood shop (where I picked up a bookcase I had ordered) and a couple of casual visits to friends of A and N.  Dropped Nick off at the Diethelms' with promise to return  this pm.  Now Anthony remains at home, preferring boredom to the hazard of new friendships. 

Picked up Washington fireworks from Diethelm -- the ones from Washington make bigger bangs.  The kids already had their rations of Oregon fireworks, that they would ignite in tiny installments each evening.  A & N's passion for bangs and flashes and smoke matched only by their passion for food and comic books. 

We learned yesterday that even though Nick's intelligence test had gone very well, he would not be accepted into the TAG program, because an earlier and different test had also been averaged into his score.  N took the news well, better than I. 

What shall we eat tonight?  There is always the sure-fire spaghetti -- sauce laced with 99-cent wine, fortified with red peppers, sophisticated with sausage, comforted with mushrooms.  Faced with bowls of this, Anthony and Nick lower their heads and with nominal assistance from fork imitate the action of industrial vacuum cleaners. Throw in a salad and a glass of milk and you have a healthy meal, with the added virtue that, if you make five pounds or more of sauce, it might stretch till tomorrow.  Spaghetti is high on the list of favorite foods Anthony has written out, up near pizza, poker sandwiches and hamburgers. 

In the gray morning I worry.  Micha was on the road today, heading northwest through New England in someone else's car.  She should be in Williamstown by now.  Will Theodore be zapped by a firecracker?  I try unsuccessfully to reach a friend who might come over as safety support. There is even Annelise to worry about, making her way along the booze-washed lanes of Rogue River to and from the wedding.  Parents spend a great deal of time worrying, Micha even more than I.  Maybe her six-week exile, with responsibility only on me, will break her of it. But after that what will break me of it?  By chance today there surfaced at home Jim Sanderson's HOW TO STOP WORRYING ABOUT YOUR KIDS, which must be read. 

T's story last night:  Allen the alligator, a nasty youth, redeemed by a return to the wild. 

 

July 6, 1987. Monday 

For breakfast today Annelise and I had yogurt with flame-red grapes dropped into it, Anthony and Nick had Grape Nuts Flakes, and Teddy had both.  He had hopped into bed with me at 6:45 with a funny look on his face and whispered "the blackerries are ripe." 

The weekend of the 4th had many pleasant moments but also certain qualities of Chinese torture.  The sense of having sole responsibility for three unresponsible boys may be something that one grows used to, but it is also something that wears one down.  By yesterday afternoon, without having been through any emergency in particular, I was displaying what is for me an early symptom of psychological breakdown: loss of memory. 

The highpoint of festivities was the fireworks.  Stephen Forde came over at about 7.  At 7:30 or so the Williams and their three kids showed up, and I carried a cooler of beer up to the intersection of Capital and Cresta de Ruta.  In the crotch of this Y the firing commenced, performed by boys whose dedication resembled both priests at High Mass and male dogs after a bitch in heat.  Favorite of all were the 25 or so "bees", little devils that hissing and flaring flew straight up into the air, burning out and dropping softly into waiting hands.  Holding on to T during this time was difficult, as he was almost levitating with excitement.  In the end Grudins escaped injury, but Patrick Williams burned his finger during a premature snatch attempt, and Meredith slipped in her dancing shoes and bumped her head on the road.  The party broke up at 9:30, leaving the road a shambles. After I put the kids to bed Forde and I ate spaghetti, drank wine and discussed the CRITIAS until almost 1. 

          

July 7, 1987.  Tuesday 

Six weeks is a hell of a long time.  Symptoms related to conjugal deprivation are too plain to ignore.  Last night I watched a Dracula film and rooted for Dracula.  Also I seem to have transferred certain cherishing emotions from Micha to my Jeep Wagoneer.  I was wildly delighted last week when the radiator was rebuilt.  Today she is getting a new air conditioner, and I can't wait to see her. 

Our second live-in, Gisele Reuer from Berlin, arrives this evening.  A letter yesterday contained a note of thanks from her father and the airport instruction to look for a young woman with a red scarf wrapped around her left arm.  Today is one of those on which I must keep special details in mind.  Nick is to be picked up on Kincaid at 12:15 by Christie Newland, who will take him to the Swim & Tennis Club. Anthony wants a ride to the Emeralds night game and expects to be picked up afterward.  Annelise wants to get to a concert by 8.  Things already forgotten:  to defrost tonight's dinner and to bring Anthony's & my picnic from home and who knows what else. 

For Gisele's stay A & N must sleep in the same room, and Anthony has already been making trouble about this.  How can I solve this one?  Maybe by doing nothing. 

 

July 8, 1987.  Wednesday 

At noon yesterday A and I collected the Jeep, which had not gotten fixed (wrong compressor), and the misplaced sandwiches, and some soda, and headed for Danebo, which is a tiny place west of town which contains a wrecking yard that had said on the phone they had the right compressor and would take the wrong one in trade.  We sat at the gas station while the tank was filled, munching sourdough bread, pickles and Genoa salami and looking north at a huge ugly dark gray cloud, twisting up into the flat overcast, that turned out to be smoke from the first day of field-burning.  We drove to the country where, for twenty minutes while I waited for the master, a friend of the his, a Bostonian guitarist of 30 with reddish hair and glassy cloud-gray eyes, told me of his UFO sightings ("the mothuh ship huvvuhed abuv the trees and sent down a bunch of little disks to explah"), his persecution by federal and state authorities (negatives of UFO pictures stolen by "Reagan's wah machine") and the new recording of voice and guitar, mainly songs of political outrage, from which the musician expected to net $3 million.  He launched into his peroration while the wrecker himself, a slender dark man with a big earring, was trying to tell me in minute detail ("Listen, guy") how to replace the pully of a Motorcraft air conditioner compressor, and while the wrecker's son, a tiny kid with big glasses, was trying to insinuate himself into the Jeep and befriend Anthony, who sat reading a borrowed MAD.  Home again, I nap briefly on the upper deck as the clouds temporarily disclose the sun.  Then trip #3 down hill to pick up Teddy, who can think of nothing but peanut butter cups but is mollified with a promised popsicle.  Back in the kitchen no popsicle can be found, so I fall back on the jumbo Oreo cookies I have hidden in a crock.  Trip #4 down hill to buy dinner and pick up the repaired VCR.  Return to deal with the VCR-related demands of T, who had smashed the damn thing in the first place.  A jog in Hendricks Park with Bo, who is so slow in following this time that once he gets quite lost.  Showered by 5, I sip lemonade and rum, teach Annelise how to make Hamburger Grudine, while making calls to the airlines to see if Gisele's plane will be on time and trying to figure out how Anthony can find Stephanie at the Ems game without being able to reach her in advance.  I convince him to eat a hamburger and I cook it.  As burger sizzles, an old friend calls from California, announces that she has a new boyfriend, and falls instantly into a fit of depression when I ask her about him.  While I am trying to smooth things over, Teddy & Nick appear and ask for hamburgers.  As they chomp away, I retreat to upper deck and an old N Y Times Business Section, which tells me all about how a dynamic CEO, retired general, has brought military discipline to his $6 billion financing firm (may he now bring it back to the military).  It is suddenly time, past time, to go on Trip #5.  At Municipal Stadium I agree with Anthony on a dangerously sketchy plan for meeting during or after the game.  Then I head for Mahlon Sweet Airport, currently under reconstruction, and get there just as Flight 1933 from San Francisco is shutting down its engines at the gate.  By her red armband I recognize Gisele, who has been traveling 21 hours and was nearly turned back by customs in Frisco.  Picking up Gisele's bags, which feel like they hold a consignment of diver's weights, I stagger towards the Jeep.  At home T & N immediately take to her, and T begins a 40-minute rampage around the house, squeaking and screaming with glee.  At about 7:45 I take him down to bed.  For T's story we must first refer to last night's.  The Small Family, Papa, Mama, Joseph, Orville and Jacky, are visited by a stray black kitten whom no one will care for except little J.  Kitten is tiny and in dire need.  Family philosophy is voiced with tedious repetition by Orville: "Don't do anything for him;  MAYBE HE'LL GO AWAY."  But Jacky always does something for him.  Time passes.  Kitten reaches cat size but does not stop growing;  becomes black panther whose purr sounds like a Mack truck.  Jacky also grows up and takes Ro (panther's name) on tour through the great capitals of Europe. Tonight's continuation: a catalog of what Ro can do.  He can make breakfast for Jacky, cracking eggs ever so gently with his big soft paws.  He is a gifted dancer whose original interpretations have a Latin flair.  He can drive a car, becoming the first-ever panther recipient of a legal operator's permit.  He reads voraciously and with much delight, though at this early stage he has not gotten beyond children's literature.  He cannot speak, lacking the necessary vocal and oral equipment;  but he CAN write and gives Jacky & friends no end of amusement with his droll fables.  I promise Teddy his final snack and go off to see Nick, who has moved into his new quarters (Anthony's new room, divided by the boys down the middle by a Berlin Wall of garden furniture) and, with Gisele as observer, narrowly win a game of Sorry that is sandwiched around a call from Micha.  T, very sleepy now, gets his bread and butter and cup of water.  Now it is near 9.  I eat two hamburgers with onion & tomato and drink Stroh's beer.  I clean up. In the living room I turn on both TV ("Moonlighting") and radio (the Eugene Ems vs the Bend Bucks on KEED).  "Moonlighting" tonight concerns the neurotic inventrix of a laser carbine who tries to murder our heroes but ends up by blowing out a large piece of ceiling which lands on her.  Such pyrotechnics, however, pale by comparison with previous transition-scene showing Cybill Shepherd in a brief silk nighty.  On the athletic front, the Ems have clawed their way back from a 2-run deficit to tie the Bucks in the 7th, but the go-ahead tally is hung up on third.  In 8th Ems bring in lion of relief James Campbell, whose ERA looks like the average August rainfall in Death Valley.  Campbell embarrasses the Bucks in the top of the inning, but in the bottom half the Ems cannot break the tie, leaving runners on 2nd and 3d.  Trip #6 is at hand.  I let the dog in, lock the house and head for the Jeep. Car radio goes on.  By the time I get to the stadium, Campbell has retired the Bucks in the 9th on two strikeouts and a pathetic dribble to 1st.  The Ems have Tray Gainous on 3d and Bob Moore on first, with one out.  As the Bucks bring in a new pitcher, I sneak up the green stairs into the stands.  Shortstop Stu Cole at bat.  Bucks pitcher Chris Limbach, who looks like he would rather be somewhere else, dishes up a strike and two balls.  On 4th pitch, righthander Cole rears back and drives the ball, like a laser beam or the pure extension of a weary father's will, five feet to the right of 3d base and on into left field.  I race through pandemonium and wait for Anthony in the Jeep. 

At about 11, with everything else done, I turn on the TV again. Best available, a WW2 potboiler called THE DEEP SIX.  Alan Ladd is the Quaker marine lieutenant who cannot pull the trigger;  Wm. Bendix, man of steel, unbelievably named Frenchy Shapiro.  "They won't get Frenchy Shapiro's life cheap!" he cries, throwing a grenade and taking a round or two of small-arms fire in the chest.  Pathetic scene as the intrepid patrol is carried back to their destroyer in an inflatable raft. "You'll live," lieutenant says to blood-covered Shapiro.  "Sure, I'll live.  I'm not hurt bad.  I'm fine.  We got it made.  But I'm tired right now, very tired."  Then Frenchy dies. 

 

July 9, 1987.  Thursday 

Worried last night when M didn't call till 10:30.  Turns out she was at a party, which she had told me about but I forgot. 

Uncertain how Gisele will turn out.  She seems to have lots of heart, but alertness and energy so far are unknown quantities.  Fortunately she won't have Theodore one-on-one at first. 

T has been making strides,  He now showers with me in the morning. When I say "Go to your room," he does, just like his brothers.  When last week I said "Pick up your room," he complied, to the point of somehow removing a large table and leaving it out in the hall.  And when he starts having a fit of demands, and is promptly warned about it, he actually stops.  Micha will be pleased. 

The kids had special taste treats, Corn Pops & Bran Chex, for breakfast this am, and behaved like angels.  Does this mean anything? 

T's story last night:  Ro restores stolen church by becoming lapcat for giant. 

 

July 10, 1987.  Friday 

In dull morning light I stand with greasy hands trying to convert a chicken carcase into sandwich filling, before making a grilled cheese on English breakfast. 

Anthony:  You forgot, Dad.  You said we would go to a restaurant for lunch every Friday. 

"I didn't." 

Theodore:  Can we watch TV? 

"No." 

Anthony:  You did. 

Theodore:  Don't like grilled cheese.  Yucky.   

Nick:  Can I call Patrick? 

"Yes.  Anthony, don't start crying.  I've got to use this chicken today." 

Nick:  Now? 

Theodore:  Grilled cheese gives me tummy-ache. 

"No not now, it's too early." 

Theodore:  Want corn pops. 

Trying to arrange dozens of small chicken pieces on bread I remember, yesterday, trying to organize and export to garbage pail a few thousand pieces of broken shower door, which had popped out and into tub under the pressure of Gisele as she cleaned bathroom.  Gisele won't get beer with lunch again.  In the pm she had called my office, waking me from the sleep of the just, and hysterically said, "SOMETHING TERRIBLE HAS HAPPENED."  I thought a child had been mutilated but it was the shower door. 

Again the Corn Pops, both in anticipation and in operation, have a civilizing effect.  Nick works brilliantly with Teddy, convincing him to finish his grilled cheese before the great treat.  After breakfast A & N go downstairs with Annelise for a bed-making lesson.  Sugar high?  If so, are they coming upstairs mornings with sugar lows?  What can I give them that has sugar and isn't produced in a factory?  GRAPES!     

Listener request day on KWAX, and as I sit here they play for somebody the suite from THE NUTCRACKER.  When I was a kid, my parents had the following 78 rpm records:  THE NUTCRACKER, Franck's D Minor Symphony, Schubert's Unfinished, Beethoven's Fifth, SHAHERAZADE, and these all became for me, like some kind of wordless myth, psychic memories shaping character.  But what were breakfasts like when my brothers and I, roughly the same ages as my three kids, sat in the kitchen on Woodbine Ave.?  All I can remember of these episodes is a mouthful of Wheatena. 

July 11, 1987.  Saturday 

Heading for Hour Two of a 5-hour furlough afforded by Annelise. I need all 5 today.  At home I got pestered to distraction.  Gisele, who was supposed to have the morning, clearly is not working out.  She is bright and civilized enough, but of a slow, unassertive and troubled cast.  Gisele is a brown-haired woman of 20.  She is tall, overweight and weak.  She takes 4 teaspoons of sugar with her coffee and eats everything she sees.  She has the tragic decency to buy extra food -- cheesecake, candy, wine cooler and root beer by the half-gallon -- with her own money.  She knows she should stop overeating, but cannot.  She promised to stop smoking but cannot.  Her modus operandi is a modus non possendi.  Theodore's time with her this morning was like a matchup between Godzilla and Bambi.  She followed him around dumbly, an image of visceral depression, as he ranted, raged, demanded and ferreted into everything, including broken shower door glass.  T finally added insult to injury, "Don't like baby-sitter."  Anthony & Nick also find her a bit odd.  After I gave her what I called the final warning about her smoking this morning, I walked into the study and found them whispering like conspirators.  They saw me and, surprise, started whispering to me as well.  "She doesn't work as much as she eats." 

But Gisele does work, and works the best she can.  Her problems seem to stem from a lack of confidence connected with medical troubles and the fear they occasion.  On a jog yesterday (she was able to sustain 5 minutes at a 12-minute pace) she told me that she was the victim of a genetic freak, having been born with one kidney.  "But I bet it's a good one," I said foolishly.  Happily it was.  Then she told me she had two uteri and a double vagina.  No one knew about this until at 11 she started menstruating, and one uterus, which was sealed, began filling up with blood and causing grief.  Even then she was told by parents and doctors to stop being a sissy and get on with it, and help did not come until she had collapsed completely and was near death. Now she looks ahead towards vaginal surgery and lives in terror of infection.  This physiological disaster may be an indirect cause of her compulsive eating;  and together with the fact that she is an only daughter, it may have gotten her pretty well spoiled by her parents as a teenager.  I have never seen anyone as territorial in the kitchen, or anyone with the gall, having interrupted her morning toilette for a snack upstairs, to call down, "I'm in the bathroom," warning all others away. 

Teddy's story last night:  Dwarf dragons don't prosper in captivity. 

 

July 13, 1987.  Monday 

More new feathers for Teddy:  he drew a picture for me yesterday, sat down and sketched out a quite respectable tree.  Also Annelise told me that while I was away yesterday, T for the first time did not seem to need her or anyone, but went off and played by himself. 

After writing Saturday I went for a jog on Pre's Trail and drove back up the hill in very sweaty condition late in the afternoon.  In Glenwood I had bought a nifty socket that would free up the hardware I needed for the shower door (said hardware, retrieved by Gisele from old shower door, then set in the vise in my shop).  Skittered down the garden steps, followed by Teddy, who prophetically wanted to watch, & Annelise.  Haste proved disastrous, for putting down my tools on the work bench I scraped my hand across the broken glass in the hardware and opened the outside of one finger to the bone.  I tell Annelise to clear the shop, I race upstairs and bleeding freely rummage around in the bandage drawer.  Nothing but wrappers at first, the kids all being bandage freaks.  Finally find one big enough to hold finger together; T appears in bathroom to watch medical drama, then our little trio reassembles in the shop.  The socket works!  but as I am removing little bolts, Anthony approaches the shop, keening.  He has no shirt on and just one shoe;  clearly is just back from somewhere distant; ignores my command not interrupt, throws himself into my arms.  Ismail follows, fully clothed, looking calmer.  Anthony, after escalating mutual verbal abuse, has been set upon by three assailants (Matt, Lisa, Misty) and thrown into a mud puddle, down at University Park.  He has walked with Is all the way up the hill (a mile and 400' of elevation) with one basketball shoe on.  Where is other shoe?  I ask, mindful that I have just paid $22.50 for these pink atrocities.  Still in mud puddle.  Anthony, disregarding seven rapid-fire contrite phone calls front Matt, heads for the shower.  Is, T, A & I head in the Jeep for University Park -- I to get shoe, Is to tell me where shoe is, Annelise to take care of Teddy, and Teddy for the thrill of it all.  In the Jeep, he pipes up out of the blue, "Let's talk about it." 

"Talk about what, Theodore?" 

"The shoe in the mud puddle."  

We reach park, find puddle, looking rather odd there in 90 degrees of sun, particularly now that it has a pink basketball shoe sticking obscenely out of its middle.  Shoe is retrieved, looking and smelling foul.  We put it on the front bike rack, which is the only use to which we have so far put the front bike rack.  At home we find Anthony calmer.  "Thanks, Dad," he says sweetly, but then seems struck by an afterthought. "Where's the movie?"  I have promised them a movie and forgotten, so I go down to get it. 

The movie they wanted, STAND BY ME, turned out to be a delayed-action disaster.  All the kids liked it, but the corpse in it put deep fear into Teddy.  Last night, predicting a nightmare, he summarized the dialogue about the corpse:  "Dead.  Not sleeping.  Won't wake up again.  That's dead."  This little snatch of discourse, as well it might, has frightened Teddy more than the whole of the STAR WARS trilogy, ALIENS and GHOSTBUSTERS.  T & I got very little sleep last night.  

Yesterday morning I took them and Ismail for a bagel breakfast -- actually to the bagel shop where instead of bagels they ate cookies.  It gave them total delight.  It seems a mystery about boys that, with a whole world of things at their disposal, they can be dissatisfied, yet can be delighted by the homeliest adventures.  Maybe the answer to this is that adventure itself delights boys;  and by adventure I mean anything that includes a geographic quest with a treat as goal. 

Yesterday afternoon I drove to Veneta, where each year at this time the Country Fair is held in a forest and attended by tens of thousands.  The light, coming down through the leaves onto wild colors and people, was fascinating, and I shot a roll of pictures and got a real break from life at home. 

 

July 14.  Tuesday 

The one unforgettable moment of a summer's day for me is dropping off the kids for their morning activities.  This summer Anthony and Nick get off at Onyx & 15th for their summer camp, Teddy 2 short blocks away for his EMU daycare.  This daily rite of passage is so dynamic that no matter how we are all feeling, grumpy or cheerful, weak or hearty, we part with the same affection and excitement.  Thus our time of parting is always the same time of spirit, and in this way events take root in the memory and become like places that always exist and can always be returned to.  It is a double place for me, for I remember with much feeling my goodbyes to my parents. 

Each day now is hotter than the last, and today may be near 100.  Last night no one could get to sleep, and a little voice told me that being tough about it would not do much good.  At 10 the three of them ended up nested with me in and around the black easy chair, watching OLIVER TWIST.  Then one by one they went down of their own accord.  Today everyone was up late, so instead of rushing a cooked breakfast we had nectarines and milk and bought big cookies on the way to school. 

Answering friends who ask how I can possibly be doing all this, I have answered once or twice that my female side has been expressing itself.  But this is just a wisecrack.  I see nothing particularly female about cooking, or dressing kids, or making sure they stay out of trouble.  A job is a job, and solo housekeeping for three boys happens to be a tough one.  All that is possibly male or female is the attitude one takes towards the job.  Also there is something about these boys, and maybe kids in general, that annuls distinctions of gender altogether.  Children have something trans-genderal, even trans-human in them, a bounce and jive shared with colts, monkeys and grasshoppers. That element reminds you that there are things about children quite beyond the normal distinctions by which we interpret personality;  that if you want to understand them, you must go beyond the language by which you normally understand yourself.  Adults generally see children as way-stations on the way to mature identity, and this attitude is clear in words like "growing up" and "growth".  But children are complete beings who lose as much as they gain with time. 

Today we are 3/4 through Micha's absence, but her return still seems very far away.  I woke this morning thinking of Teddy's safety, and my next thought was how my stress might, if I let it, distract me from what was really important. 

 

July 15, 1987.  Wednesday 

Yesterday in the heat I dropped off Anthony, Teddy and Annelise, all eager as puppies, at Amazon Pool.  I had my bike on the rack and a bottle of beer packed in ice in the seat-bag.  I drove to the river and biked 40 minutes on the Willamette Trail (so hot that the banks of fennel along the way gave off a wild smell of roasting, so abundant with blackberries that I could eat them by the handful without getting off the bike) and stopped in a breezy wood to take the beer out of the dripping bag.  Then I drove to Blair St. and bought half a silver salmon, now in season and very cheap, to make for dinner.  Picked up the radiant trio at Amazon.  Anthony is in the process of falling in love with Teddy -- he volunteered to undress and dress him in the locker room and actually sang to him this morning.  Annelise is of such a sunny character that she appeals to the happiness that is latent in children. 

After a hectic dinner I went off to Carmichael's to play poker.  This was forgetful if not irresponsible of me, for I should have known that Carmichael's new house in the woods would not have a phone.  At home T would not sleep, again tormented by demons of death.  At midnight I found him at last asleep on my bed with the lights on.  What shall I tell T about the dead?  that they are angels?  Or shall I love him and let it pass? 

Annelise and Gisele are like a contrariety out of THE TEMPEST or Melville.  Annelise is a beautiful healthy girl with the strength of a tree and a delighted interest in everything.  If she has any hang-ups at all, they have escaped me.  Gisele is an affectless, object-like person who, no matter where she sits or stands, seems to be blocking the way to something.  Her only passion is food, and if I, cooking or cleaning, happen to obstruct her quest, she infringes at the counter, hovering over me like a cumulous.  Unless brutally prodded (and I am not above brutally prodding her) she is so helpless with Teddy that he would be easier to handle without her.  Yesterday, again and in her presence, "Don't like baby-sitter," followed by "Don't like her face or her hair."  N's face is gentle and not at all unlikeable;  but she never really smiles.  She wears huge glasses that, burdening her lower nose, drive her nostrils together into the form of a snout.  Her hair, a zillion tiny dark curls, hangs like a mop.  And total demeanor, in everything except games, food and TV-watching, suggests pathological lack of interest in people and life. 

T's story last night:  little boy, alone on primeval island with nothing but crayons and pad, creates the world by drawing it. 

 

July 16, 1987.  Thursday 

Annelise has noticed that two of Teddy's front teeth are slightly gray, but Dr. McGillivary says this is natural and not serious.  T's terror of night, though, remains.  He bounced into my room at 3 this am.  The efficient cause of all this is clear enough, but I'm beginning to think that the power of the effect has something to do with his mother's absence.   

I took Teddy out of daycare early yesterday, because he does not like the rest period (everyone else, including counselors, wants to rest, but he doesn't), and he and I had an idyllic time watering the lawn.  "Idyllic" times to me are times when people simply enjoy what they are doing without complaining, quarreling or making series of requests.  Such times have slowly been increasing for all of us. Anthony's face is clear of strain and romantically handsome;  Nick has not thrown a crying fit in two weeks, and he is noticeably calmer, more loving and more mature with Teddy.  Part of this must be summer and sun and lack of stress.  Other causes:  I make them contribute more than before;  I give them more of the simple things they enjoy;  I give them things, when possible, without conditions or caveats.  There is also the presence of Annelise and also of Gisele, who seems more and more at ease with them and is crazy about games. 

We all went to the Stevens' for a barbecue last night.  Drank Dos Equis and waved away yellowjackets in the back yard while five boys raised hell in the entrails of the big white house.  

T's story:  Twin girls enter den of big gopher, are captured by same, find escape routes via dream-messages from guardian teddy-bears. 

 

July 17, 1987.  Friday 

Teddy will now endure rest period at the EMU if he can lie down halfway into their tent (no one is allowed to rest inside it) and has a cassette of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST handy.  Better yet, he slept through last night without fear, perhaps strengthened by a pleasant reading session with Gisele.  Gisele becomes more helpful from day to day.  She has no instinct for doing the right thing, but does many things well once told.  She is uncommonly grateful for decent treatment and is smiling more and has stopped smoking in her room.  But the fearful eating binge continues.  This morning a piece of apple pie Jerry Diethelm gave me yesterday looked as though it had been visited by a giant mouse, and the level in Maike's raspberry schnapps is dropping steadily. 

Anthony spent last night at Aaron Loft's.  Nick watched the Cosby Show with Gisele and went to bed very content.  I was out late for a farewell visit with Fred Newberry and woke to the phone at 6:30 am.  No one on the line.  I thought it was a crank and hung it up the next four times.  Turned out to be Micha. 

Yesterday was Comic Book Store day, when once a week Anthony & Nick do not come to my office after sports but rather meet me at said store.  Just as with the fireworks, their concentration during these missions is wonderful and oddly enough makes me proud of them.  Comic book mania partakes of love of fantasy, packrat instincts, scholarly passion and greed for monetary gain.  Anthony already has 80 of them, safely stored in little plastic sleeves, Nick 20. 

Much shopping yesterday.  July money is running out, so I have decided to budget menues in advance.  With Anthony at the dirt-cheap Canned Goods Outlet in Glenwood, bought four 12 oz boxes of nested fettucine, two bottles Bel Arbres Sherry, two bottles Bel Arbres Burgundy, two little boxes of candy and a large assortment of salted crackers, for a total of $6.59.  Crackers turned out very stale.  We drove to the Millrace and tried in the rain to feed them to the ducks and geese.  The ducks and geese would have none of them. 

Now Micha's return is so near that I can build a bridge of menues to it.  Friday, Saturday:  spaghetti (made yesterday). 

   Sunday:  chicken (to be defrosted) 

   Monday:  pizza (traditional) 

   Tuesday:  hamburgers 

   Wednesday:  beef stew 

   Thursday:  more beef stew or hot dogs and sausages 

   Friday:  clam chowder 

   Saturday:  she's back. 

Northwest Mutual approves of my crosscountry skiing article, so now we are sure of money for September. 

    

July 18, 1987.  Saturday 

Nick spent last night at the Diethelms';  he is delighted to do this and I think has a quieting effect on Nicky D, making N persona grata with parents.  Anthony was at the Pekins yesterday afternoon, and they are all coming over today.  Dropped Teddy & A at Hunts' just now, as T has not had much male society recently.  T is still scared of going to sleep.  I had to lie down next to him before he did at 10 last night.  This morning he jumped into my bed, described a nightmare about a "bad face in the door that went 'rarr'."  In the dream Teddy pulled the face off the door and broke it.  He won that round.  Story last night:  Peabody botches direction of family vacation trip, mistakenly smooches with intruder bear. 

Nick's easiness with other kids amounts to a kind of genius.  He has all sorts of friends his own age, can hold his own quite well with Anthony's friends or play very enjoyably with kids two years younger.  All this without any real effort at adaptation or making an impression:  he just quietly enjoys society of all sorts, and quietly shows it.  Anthony, like me burdened with an unsolicited self-awareness, marvels, I know, at N's prowess.  What does it take, I wondered as a child, to be respected by other boys?  -- not realizing of course that to be respected one has to stop wondering.  Norman Mailer has a good story on the same issue among soldiers ("The Language of Men").  Mailer suggests that one must not only learn how other men speak, not only impress them with masculine feats, but emulate their whole pattern of responses, in order to be respected.  But one morning recently I realized that it was something else.  On the way to sports camp in the car, N noticed a buddy crossing 18th on his bike and so instantly exploded into a greeting that I almost jumped in my seat.  This is what makes him beloved, I thought -- the amusability, the immediacy of response, the readiness of the heart.  And this is why Nick's kind of popularity cannot be learned or copied. 

Teddy's morning project:  a letter to mama, very thick, for it contained a pen and a month's supply of cancelled checks, all sealed with a postage stamp. 

Gisele's dad in Germany phones at 5:58 am, mistaken about time. 

Our savings bank wrote yesterday, not from their local office but an unsigned notice from a computer center in Walnut Creek, CA, to say that our insurance had lapsed and we were about to be without protection.  This was the unexpected continuation of an error made by their Northwest Office, not in Eugene but in Tacoma, WA, which had ignored at least three insurance billings to our reserve account. Result:  they who were the cause of our insurance lapsing are now solemnly warning me that our insurance has lapsed.  This problem is cleared up, at least temporarily, by hurried calls to Karen (insurance) and Rheta (Tacoma bank).  All of them very nice, but no one seems to realize that once an error is in computer storage, it will recur until someone gets it out.  

A rainy weekend.  The Mercedes right rear window is stuck open and protected with a swatch of clear vinyl which keeps getting displaced by the elements.  I leave here soon to buy provisions, write checks, supervise if conditions are right the start of a great Beautification project to culminate next Friday. 

 

July 20, 1987.  Monday 

Went down to check on Teddy at midnight last night.  He lay with eyes wide open and much fever.  Give him Tylenol and water, listened to a remarkable hectic exposition on how to conquer nightmares and on how to avoid death (avoid growing up!), pulled in sleeping bag, slept on floor till 6:30.  This morning an infected eye, diagnosed at the doctor's as orbital cellulitus, quite dangerous.  He is in good spirits, and the prescribed drug, Ceclor, is supposed to knock the thing out. 

Saw at the doctor's a kid whose ear had been all but ripped off by his own dog.  Self-defense? 

A tiring weekend, the calmest parts of which were giving a late dinner to the Stevensons Saturday and the next morning taking the kids for their final mama-less Sunday treat to Taco Time, where we ate outdoors, then for a walk around the Adidas Oregon Trail, then for ice cream at the Tin Lizzie.  Moment of solidarity on the trail, as we walked with T on my shoulders and one brother holding each of his hands.  They are behaving better and better towards each other.  Day's darkest moment:  Anthony snitches a quarter at Payless, rams it into SLIME machine and pockets a container full of disgusting pink ooze.  At home he promptly forgets about it, SLIME falls into Theodore's clutches, T stuffs it down bathroom sink drain. 

T's weekend stories:  Peabody sequel dealing with the Peabody kids, who in both stories got VERY TIRED and fell into happy sleeps.  2nd story about thunder storm, children sleeping one level each on triple-deck bunk, each child interprets storm into different nightmare, each conquers it in a different way.

July 21, 1987.  Tuesday 

Today began in a shambles, with the dog missing overnight, and me in bed blearily waiting to see T's face, so I could count the eyes.  T appeared about 7, not looking bad at all, fever-free and spry as a fiddler.  Bo shortly later showed up, jangling happily down the ramp. This was all well and good, but I was a wreck.  Perfect day for spending two hours in a body shop waiting room on Rte 126 in E Springfield, while they tried to get the Mercedes' rear window closed. I had coffee, strolled with a cigar, toured Knecht's Auto Parts, read the Eugene Register-Guard twice and then turned to some old Reader's Digests.  Fewer good items than usual in these.  "Stranded -- and Dying -- on Cuddy Mountain" was ok:  freezing men on old Cuddy gut their live horses and climb in.  But hadn't they seen similar stunt THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK?  I was about to begin "My First Date, Walter Cronkite" when my eye fell on an issue of ROAD & TRACK which (a rare thing for them) actually condemned a car manufacturer.  Involuntary Acceleration in Audi 5000.  IA means among other things that when you start your new $23,000 Audi 5000 you had better not have your 6-year old boy standing out in front, for the thing is likely to rear up and destroy him.  This actually happened, and despite 17 other similar but less tragic complaints in one model year, Audi claimed driver error.  The rest of the day spent trying to nap or going on errands.  I left home just now at a moment of triumph:  Anthony had found the home computer after weeks of looking. 

T's story:  boy talks to clouds who answer in echoes. 

   

July 22, 1987.  Wednesday 

Got Teddy back to daycare by 10 today -- no symptoms showing after two days of Ceclor.  Three days before Micha's return, everything is ok, more than ok, on the boy front, but the live-in sector has problems. Anthony and Nick don't like Gisele, whom they characterize as lazy, defensive, intrusive, selfish, tasteless (fond of PLAYGIRL male pinups) and uncommunicative.  She has occasional good periods with them and Teddy, but these are not enough to make up for her enormities.  T insults her so openly that this morning I was afraid of leaving them alone together.  I'm afraid Micha won't like her.  Annelise, on top of this, appeared in tears last night at about 10 just at the moment when galloping Errol Flynn lowered his lance and dug in his spurs in THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE.  She has 3 1/2 weeks to write 6 papers for summer school and feels she can't do it under present circumstances. She wants a break of some sort, either to move out or be relieved of work.  Her emergency is real, but if we meet her needs and she stays, we will have from now to mid-August an overcrowded house with two live-ins neither of whom take care of children. 

T's story:  Sam the Fox steals Peabody's sandwiches, foils attempts at capture. 

Dinner:  beef beergignion. 

T last night, seeing Errol embrace Olivia de Haviland, "How do they make babies?"  Like all tots but more aggressively, T sculpts language to express thought for which he lacks available idiom.  The holograph bird on a credit card he called "colorish", a short cut to his school is a "little way".  In the car today, "You know those big wheels for trucks they blow up and drive in the water?  I want one." 

I walked by a bunch of sports camp kids practicing softball near the Ed School today, and sure enough Anthony was among them, catching fungo.  Wonderful, how hard he runs and powerfully he throws. 

4pm.  Treat lunch at the Dairy Queen:  I have small vanilla malted, A & N order french fries and peanut parfaits, without the peanuts. 

At home later I offered A, N and Ismail a buck to babysit T in the yard for an hour, stretched out on chaise long, got very sleepy.  The sun had just come out for the first time through heavy clouds, and the light seemed to be full of golden X-rays that got into every joint and muscle, and lying there was closer to pure happiness than I would publicly admit.  Voices from the yard began to have that strained timbre which presages mayhem, my ears heard disconnected phrases like "No!", "Don't get on!", "It'll break!", accompanied by giggles and the appropriate squeaks of some contraption under strain;  but ears did not transmit to brain more than a vague sleepy sense of guilt.  Then followed by screams a very loud report as the tire swing branch breaks with 300 lbs of kids hanging on it.  Branch missed kids by at least a foot, Teddy wouldn't have been hurt anyway, being in tire. 

I got mad and said I wouldn't build them another, but how can you be mad for long at four other you’s down there under a fir branch in July doing just what you would have done and often did in their place? The only purpose of anger here is accountability, letting them know that somebody gets upset when they risk lives for the sake of a thrill. Let them know that if they are going to express boyish spirits in violent ways, they'd better do it gamewise and in peer-groups than by tempting fate and wondering who will take the shot.  But you should have heard the laughter.  Annelise, who came home through the yard a few minutes later and found them already up to something else, said she asked what they were doing and they answered, all four at once, "Nothing!" 

 

July 23, 1987.  Thursday 

For two nights now I have gotten the right amount of sleep and today at 7:15 had forged ahead into the thick of things, making coffee and stirring the Cream of Wheat, when Zeus put it into the mind of Theodore to breed dissention, arousing the wrath of his brothers.                N                          A  

R, the peacemaker, can interrupt lines of antagonism between any two points on the circumference, but in so doing leaves two other channels of friction open for business.  A desperate situation, which almost always escalates into further complexity, as shorter vectors of anger build between principles and peacemaker.  Locus classicus of the most useless phrase ever coined, "STOP IT!"  (T's only effort at reconciliation was the statement, probably a noble lie, "I'm teasing myself").  Finally I separated them, but it broke out again on the way down the hill, this time to the crooning strains of Mozart's clarinet quintet.  I was rightly accused of favoring T, who has gotten more than his share of patience since onset of orbital cellulitus.  Of course I indignantly denied this. 

Troubles with A & N vanished in the magic of the 15th & Onyx parting, but T opened a new canto by refusing to go to his daycare. "Boring." I dragged him there via indirect routes, including an elevator.  I bet he's right.  At his frenetic pace of growth, he has outgrown himself and needs some new challenge.  After squabble #1 this morning, he asked me over the Cream of Wheat, "What is the future?  Can I see it?"  Told him only his mind could see it, that he had to close his eyes.  So he did, and I began trying to drum up Anthony as a big man, Nick as a big man, Teddy as paterfamilias with kids and beloved wife. 

Story last night:  Using dastardly expedient of hostage cub, Peabody at last captures Sam the Fox.  Police chief discovers Sam can talk.  In the midst of an otherwise forgettable interrogation scene at the chief's office, Teddy broke into the story and took it over. Thanks to T, Sam talks his way out of imprisonment by complimenting Peabody on the quality of stolen sandwiches.  Sam, with twin cubs Sol & Simon, becomes intimate with Peabody family. 

This poetic catharsis does not make T any sleepier, rather seems to invest him with new energies.  Since the STAND BY ME nightmare, he has demanded attention from lights-out right up to sleep, saying he has "bad thoughts".  The only way I can handle this siege is through an interruptus method in which I keep leaving and coming back, with medicine, with snack, etc., but last night none of these would work, so I let him into my bedroom upstairs. 

Why so much talk about Teddy?  He has had the most emergencies, but that isn't the real reason.  He is 4, and is the only child who needs the full parent treatment.  Anthony and Nick want their freedom and have thrived this summer by getting more of it;  Teddy needs constant help and watching, and these in turn originate narrative. 

 

July 24, 1987.  Friday 

I just called Gisele and told her she had to go.  Why "called"? Because she was out late, got up late, and has not wanted much to talk. I told her that her priorities, no matter how justified, were out of sync with those of a close-knit family, and that she was making more work than she was doing.  This is but the half of it, the nicer half.  But half in this case is enough.  Why today?  Maybe because yesterday she made up Anthony and Nick as punks, or because she was out last night with Mike, black security guard from Corvallis (or so he says), a stoned, wasted, fortyish street-lecher who refused to look me in the eye.  Sitting across my own kitchen table from Mike socked home what it meant to be housing Gisele, and I didn't want any more of it. About two hours of sleep last night, as I tried to be the watchdog. Our real watchdog was missing.  Bo, as though consciously punctuating the two ends of Micha's trip, found another pile of shit, this time again recognizably human, to roll about in on a berry-picking trip with Annelise & kids yesterday, and was simply too foul to be let into his own garage.  Now I must hit him with detergent again, and worry about the transient who must be living up there.  After serving dinner I biked up there last night to talk to Eric Kelley (who lives nearest), and the ten minutes I was gone were ample time for Teddy to get on Nick's back and the pair of them to fall.  T's cheek bleeding on my return, and I made the judgment call not to go for stitches.  All this happening, together with calls from Micha and my mother, while dapper Mike, waiting for Gisele, slouches mutely at the table, and just before A & N (probably realizing it is to be their last night of regna Saturnalia) started making calls to arrange their Friday evening. Nick will go to Tate's, but Tate must come to us first.  Anthony is off to his first evening heterosexual party, but must find a ride home with someone.  I am invited to dinner at the Shankmans’ and will go if I feel secure enough to leave the house with Annelise under the present circumstances. 

So it is with the ends of things, unless refashioned by art.  Micha's six weeks ended last night with a banquet and a dance and many expressions of liking.  My six weeks will end with the simple wish to deliver unto next week a full healthy family.  You wish these great events would wrap themselves up more dignifiedly.  But it looks as though, if I remember any event as symbolically marking beginning and end, it will be Bo festooned with human shit. 

Story last night:  Sam & Peabody in fire engine rescue cat chased up pole by ferocious mouse. 

 

July 26, 1987.  Sunday 

All day yesterday spent on the Great Beautification.  Gisele, whose walking papers seem to have turned her into an Ariel of efficiency, addressed with Anthony the A & N disaster scene and made it a human bedroom again.  Annelise scrubbed the kitchen floor and did the upstairs bedroom.  Anthony, using a new can of Tuff Stuff foam, took spots out of the carpet.  I scrubbed and waxed doors and cabinets, swept the garage, mowed the lawn (with Teddy, who loves this particular chore), watered the whole garden, lopped off intrusive branches, painted the street numbers and nailed them up again, cooked a salmon and potatoes for later.  Nick was spared all this, having had his overnight prolonged by a trip to Rat Ranch with Tate's granddad.  By 6, when I left for the airport, things were looking shipshape indeed.  M's plane, which had been listed as late, arrived at 6:10, and I found her in the lobby.  Nick and Teddy were home when we drove in and came rushing upstairs to meet her.

Afterward:  On Meditation

I call this book a meditative study, and perhaps at long last it is now time to cough up what ‘meditation’ means to me.  To me, a meditative study is an attempt to engage with all the permutations of a single idea.  The fact that these permutations may be legion or even innumerable only adds to my gritty resolve.  For my goal is not success but rather a respectable failure.  In other words, I aim to pursue each idea until I have exhausted my own reserves of mental material and energy.  An amusing writer of the last century named G. I. Gurdjieff once vowed 

I had given myself my word that during the whole of this time I would do no writing whatsoever, but would only,...  slowly and gently drink down all the bottles of old calvados now at my disposal by the will of fate in the wine-cellar of the Prieuré, and specially provided the century before last by people who understood the true sense of life.

For my own part, I didn’t conclude this book until my cellar of whims and oddities was empty.