It's impossible to start a poem with that phrase anymore.
In the 1950s, at Hartford Hospital (the site - decades later - of my siblings' births) Dr. Scoville made an accidental discovery about memory. He was trying to curb a patient's seizures. This, from Lauren Slater's Opening Skinner's Box:
Based on this last assumption [that memory was diffuse, without locale, scattered like widely sown seed over the whole rind of the cortex], Scoville had no hesitation about removing Henry's hippocampus. The operating room was cool. Henry lay awake on the steel table. Because there are no nerves in the brain, such surgery was performed with the patient completely conscious, only a local anesthetic to numb the skin of the scalp. Swoosh went the shot of lidocaine. A moment laster Henry must have seen Scoville coming at him with his hand-cranked drill, and then two holes were bored above each of his open eyes, and into these holes Scoville inserted a small spatula, with which he jacked up Henry's frontal lobes.
The operating room was quiet. Nurse, hand me this. Nurse, hand me that. But otherwise, no sound. Scoville was looking into Henry. He was looking under the hood of Henry's brain, and how beautiful it was beneath the cortical coral reef, in the brain's interior capsules, where pyramidal cells are shaped like hyacinth, in complex cones, where neurons are tiny but dense. Into this nether region Scoville now inserted a silver straw. Scoville slowly threaded the silver straw deep into Henry's pulsing brain, and then - there - he suctioned out the pink-gray seahorse shape on either side, the entire hippocampus now gone. Inside Henry's head, a great gap appeared, a ragged hole where something once lived.
What did Henry feel as Scoville sucked out his hippocampus? He was, after all, wide awake, thoroughly alert, and the hippocampus, although no one knew it at the time, is the seat of many of our memories. Did Henry feel his past leave him in a single suck? Did he feel the entrance of forgetfulness, like a cold thing coming in or was it more a sensation of sliding: your lover, your qualms, the cats calling beneath the porch in summer - all dropping down into nothing?
It was this accident that gave rise to the experiment on sea slugs through which we learned about the work synapses do for us.
One of the first phrases I associate with moving to Hartford is "build your synapses." When Robyn and I lived together, we would occasionally take meandering drives and learn new paths through Parkville and Frog Hollow and Asylum Hill. This activity was something she called "building synapses."
The other day, I withdrew from whatever social engagement I had arranged (a bad habit of mine) and sludged through some old vhs tapes to find a film I hadn't watched recently. I used To Catch a Thief as a comfort film for years - if I was sick or sad or lonely, it was one of my standards, like something you hum to yourself to quell your nerves.
I let it play through. When the 1994 World Cup footage I had taped over came on, I let that play, too.
There was something comforting about the sounds of it. I let it play and it let its soundtrack waft through my little house, heretofore unfamiliar with the fragmentary phrase construction of sportscasters.
Bits of memories came back to me about that tournament: that red-headed US player; their horrible uniforms; my dad's temporarily reassigned attention from baseball to soccer that summer; that the US team did better than people had anticipated.
And then - did I remember this or did I return to a spot vacant of particulars and inscribe a memory there - I read about Andrés Escobar and it was familiar and I felt, for a moment, the fascinated repulsion of an adolescent. It was easy to feel things in high contrast then, easy to slough off complexities.
Yes - it was this very game over which I taped a Hitchcock movie. This goal is covered up, leaving only muttered half-sentences of the end of the game. Would the sports casters have known? How eerie to watch this footage knowing what would follow, knowing that Escobar had, in a way, set into action a series of events that would give narrative structure to his life. It was rent, suddenly, from the complexities and undefinables of any-life and thrust into narrative significance - something like sea slugs, significant for the meaning we have plied from them after the experiments.
Last night it was that I picked this up and unfurled and refolded it again and again. It was white in the dream.
The night before - I fully acknowledge that this is grandiose, but when if not in dreams can we be grandiose, eh? - I dreamed that I discovered a new kind of falcon.
Don't laugh.
It was a peacock falcon and it was beautiful.
I willed myself into dreaming a gannet's plunge in the early hours of the morning.
I dreamed I protected sundry kittens and the puppies of lost friends from eagles.
I dreamed I was on my back, again, shirt damp from the spongy ground that surrounds the foundation of L. M. Montgomery's house, after I had retreated from the dives this bird's mother took at my head.
We made the signs for the Separatist Road celebration. This was a task that, I think, I, Sarah, Patrick, and Josh undertook years ago - maybe 15 years ago. As I was explaining the project to Jillian and Faith - who the key players were (Mena and Robert were to have staring roles in the signs; and Nora for nostalgia's sake), the kind of humor ("only a jerk would park on the corner!") that we were aiming at - I felt this rush of gratitude for the extended family my parents shaped for us.
There are so many other things running through my head, but I think I'll just leave them, for now. How lovely - for sign-making to be significant!
[Also, a very happy birthday to my brilliant and beautiful friend, Sarah!]
I had just said to Jillian that I communicate better when conversation occurs through some medium. Later, I told another person that it's easier for me to talk when I'm holding a book in my hand.
So, it was a delightful challenge when someone asked me why I have cried (repeatedly) at the British Museum and I struggled through several media to explain myself.
I wanted to touch it so badly. The feeling was almost irresistible. I think it must have been a combination of the heat, my isolation (I hadn't talked to anyone in a week, at least), and the enormity of the museum. I could almost see the statue breathe, and I started to cry.
My first response to the question was to explain what I find ideologically problematic about the discursive structure of the museum. I rambled my way around some issues, in particular, that I have with the representation of African "art objects" during modernity, namely that their presentation of cultural and ritualistic artifacts would seem to suggest that African modernity did not occur. I meandered around the idea that display and possession are linked, and that it can be difficult for people to be aware of how the desire that engenders shapes their responses to what they see.
This was a thoroughly incorrect answer to the question, but I didn't figure that out until the next morning.
Books create in me a feeling of comfort and support that it is difficult to imagine going without for very long. I almost always carry a book (sometimes as many as five) around with me. And so, when I got back to my house, I curled up on the couch with The Bear and stacked all my museum theory around me. [I realize the defensiveness of a position like this. Living in a city like Hartford, with its fierce and unapologetic anti-intellectualism, has made me not insensitive to the image of the intellectual protected and shrouded, even blinded, by books. What I actually feel is something distinct from this image, though.] And so it was with comfort that I thumbed through books thrice-read, with thrice-scripted marginalia.
I found this:
once removed from the continuity of everyday uses in time and space and made exquisite on display, stabilized and conserved, objects are transformed in the meanings that they may be said to carry: they become moments of ownership, commodities.
It is reading exactly this kind of thing (combined with an upbringing darned through with Marxism) that makes me a bit indignant and irreverent around museums: I came up with a formula that I imagined summed up the reasons behind my lachrymosity: 1. See Sims and Crew quote. 2. The observation of resituated and condensed culture. 3. Experiencing some degree of wonder at the incandescent unfamiliarity of the objects. 4. Experiencing horror (or something like it) at the combined semiotic and actual (physical) wounding of the objects. 5. The (again) irreverent and automatic (bratty) perception that the collectors, and the museum itself during certain eras, were pilfering bastards. [I realize this is a harsh judgment, and one that is the result of consuming a fair number of incendiary conversations throughout my life about ideological apparatuses...]
"Good," I thought, "I've neatly wrapped up and contained the precise reasons for crying at the British Museum." I should know by now to be wary of good, to be wary of neat. I spent much of the very early hours of this morning reshaping what I had thought via text message - a rather astounding mode of composition!
When we enter a place like the British Museum (especially now with its new, kind of postmodern vaulted atrium) I think the smallness of our bodies in the face of this gargantuan repository of culture and history (the high ceilings, the vast and encyclopedic collection) cognitively primes us for tears.
And that was it. And, in another way, that wasn't it at all. As I mulled this over - after coffee, after emails - I noticed a half-knot forming in my throat (a sure sign, if ever there was one, that there is more going on than what I am putting into words). I had been thinking all week of that summer I lived in New Jersey, remembering (I had chosen not really to think about this time critically) all the remarkably foolhardy choices I made that summer, shaking my head, slack-jawed at the shape of those months.
They are aspects of my mother's particular means of problem-solving: isolation and unfamiliarity. She encouraged me to leave Connecticut that summer I chose New Jersey and she encouraged me to go away that summer after I finished my graduate program (a phrase that I use, decidedly, as a euphemism for another period of my life that I ended abruptly at around the same time).
So it was that with these intentions (seeking anonymity, removing myself from places on which I had impressed memories) that I headed for Europe. It was after about three months of isolation, of minimal conversation and interaction, of intensive writing and research, that I returned almost ritualistically to the British Museum. Day after day I would enter through the atrium, and each time the lightheadedness would hit me almost instantly. And, at some point during my meanderings, I would feel the undeniable clutch of throat that precedes tears.
I think part of it was that the world doesn't seem quite so enormous with another person bearing witness to your life. When you have had that and then, for whatever reason, you remove yourself from it, the scale of things seems to explode, so that even a pill, netted in its systematized place, can seem too grand to comprehend.
I have been meaning to frame this memory cloth for years. I got it when I was finishing grad school. The William Benton Museum of Art had been engaging art that relates to human rights and, as part of that initiative, they had about a hundred South African memory cloths on display. I've written before about some of the things I found particularly compelling to study (cultural representations of collective memory and trauma in postcolonial contexts). For those of you who read this regularly, you are already familiar with my creative interest in memory. Besides engaging these interests, memory cloths are the visual representations of verbalized narratives. And, well, I'm a sucker for all things ekphrastic.
I hadn't framed it yet, because I wasn't certain how to deal with the narrative element. The cloth came with a narrative, in the words of the creator, printed in - I'll say it - ugly, ugly arial. I felt as though it should probably be hand written for the purposes of display - the little, impersonal rectangle that came with it was out of the question. But I didn't know what kind of paper I should use or whether my own hand writing would look right. For that matter, I wasn't entirely convinced that applying my own handwriting to another's voice was something I wanted to engage in this context.
[The Bear was curious, too!]
I pealed back the cloth from its board and my heart fluttered right up into my throat when I saw it: she had written it out - in her own hand!
I understand that there's a degree of romanticization occurring here. But I can't help it - there is something about the fact of another person pressing ink into paper that thrills me to my very core. It's not written to me, obviously; it's a much different sensation than what happens to me when I read a letter from a loved one. This has to do with language and time and indisputable indexicality.
From the Farm Security Administration - Office of War Information Photograph Collection (Library of Congress)
For just a moment, just a hint of a moment, really, I forgot my grandfather had died. I know it makes no sense. He died seven years ago, but, as I was reading in Atonement of a tank attack in France, I had the sudden, very strong urge to talk to my grandfather about World War II.
Today, I sat on my couch, legs curled under me, blinds and windows down in an effort to block the 93-degree outside, the regular crank (at around 120 bpm) of the ceiling fan the only soundtrack, and I read it over and over, aloud:
Nevertheless the winter wears on and death follows death. I've tried it, and know how the narrowing-down feeling conflicts with the feeling of life's coming to a point, not a climax but a point. At that point one must, yes, be selective in one's choice if you see what I mean. Not choose this or that because it pleases, merely to assume the idea of choosing, so that some things can be left behind. It doesn't matter which ones. I could tell you about some of the things I've discarded but that wouldn't help you because you must choose your own, or rather not choose them but let them be inflicted on and off you. This is the point of the narrowing-down process. And gradually, as the air gets thinner as you climb a mountain, these things will stand forth in a relief all their own—the look of belonging. It is a marvelous job to do, and it is enough just to approximate it. Things will do the rest. Only then will the point of not having everything become apparent, and it will flash on you with such dexterity and such terribleness that you will wonder how you lived before—as though a valley hundreds of miles in length and full of orchards and all sorts of benevolent irregularities of landscape were suddenly to open at your feet, just as you told yourself you could not climb a step higher.
And I keep coming back to it, butting my head against it like some obstinate 3-year-old: I am terrified of the narrowing-down process. I want to remember the things - more than that! - I want to catalogue, make a record of the things that to me are somehow or other divine.
I find, as my panoply of experiences grows, that most often the concepts I thumb my nose at are the very ones that I come around to accepting sooner or later. I push hard against things. I interrogate them for as long as my endurance possibly allows and then they either break or I believe them. It's a sinister metaphor - but I am generally not very sinister at all, so I will allow myself this image. And I will push, today, against the idea that we must accept the choice to "leave some things behind."
So:
Things that happened yesterday:
Connecticut sped by me (or I sped by it, really) in its high green glory. It is the green of these trees that I miss whenever I am away during summer. I missed it on trips to Kansas or Colorado. I missed this green in that greenest of places (or, at least, it's recognized for its greens): Ireland. The last significant trip I made on a bus was from Galway to Dublin in 2006. I rode that bus across the sparsely treed island immediately after an unhinged man spit in my face. He spit right in my face and it smelled like dip and whiskey-pickled rot. There was a teenager and her mother waiting for the bus, too. Later, they apologized for not trying to help me.
We arrived at dia:beacon and it seemed as though it was going to be rude to eschew the guided tour. So I went. I went with Barbara and our guests and I let Kirsten lead me.
It happened first when I stepped into the On Karawa room. I knew his work already; I had studied it - I had even handled it during my internship at the Wadsworth. It had never particularly effected me before. Maybe it had to do with the space they dedicated to the work at dia; he had an entire room (probably 600 square feet) with about 30 canvases. Maybe it was seeing that many of them together. Something clicked; my throat cinched; and I got it. Staring down mortality - a nice fit with Ashbery (whom I had started reading that morning).
We volunteered to read them out loud. As our mouths pressed out the Sol Lewitt instructions, our voices would sometimes overlap and sometimes synchronize. The instructions were absurd, specific, and ridiculous. And there was I, barely able to hold in my laughter at times. Our inflections lined up occasionally; other times we just missed each other. There was a general tone of sarcastic school marm (how I imagine I sound when I read the instructions for the evaluation forms my students end up having to proctor). [Oh, Sol, we miss you!] The thing of it is, the fact of the fun of it never stops being surprising.
I climbed over and through and around George Trakas's Beacon Point. I stomped on it and splashed in it and abraded my knuckles against its sundry surfaces. I photographed it the way you might macro the skin of a new love, as if by desperate and magnified documentation you will not lose this feeling, this utter and speechless thrill of discovering new crannies and convexes. I didn't want to leave it, ever. I could have slept, curled against one of its posts, fingertips dangling into the grey-dove Hudson.
But it was hot and humid and there were other people (and my job) to consider. And so, I elected not, after all, to sleep with the pier, but to return to the museum. I thought I knew that the only way I really wanted to experience the Richard Serras was to be alone in silence, folded like some embryo against them.
Alone was not an option. I could hear other people and their sounds. I took to it anyway. I stretched my arms as close as I could to the steel. I stomped and tip-toed and listened to my own breath reverberating in the space. And when I got to the center, I laid down on the cold, cold concrete in savasana, the warmth and humidity of my flesh slipped away, absorbed into the floor. I sang - I really sang - for the first time in years. I let unfurl in pianissimo Se Tu M'Ami and it soared and swelled into the high ceilings of what was the loading dock of a Nabisco box factory.
Then it shifted. I finished the aria and just breathed. At the other end of the gallery someone started cooing a Mourning Dove's call. He did it thrice before I reciprocated, the inverted call. We repeated our respective positions, as much claiming territory as making overtures to each other. And before I realized I had decided to be complicit to improvisation, there we were, writing each other. Leaving only very temporary indexes of an intimacy anonymous and irreproducible.
I want it to be clear that by this point I had wept four times. If you have not read Pictures and Tears by Jim Elkins, you must.
As we drove east into Connecticut's center, I saw so many hawks. They soared and soared and played and wobbled. And I could not tear my eyes away. I'm certain that the woman sitting behind me must have thought I had completely lost the plot. She did not stay for the group photograph we all posed for outside the bus. She smelled like Goldschlager - in a good way.
There's more:
I met Salman Rushdie - I will write more about this on The Absurde Round Table (I think it's a more appropriate forum for such musings), but for the moment I will describe the point at which I wept during his talk. He had just finished identifying himself as "crow number one." He was using it to suggest that the political situation that followed the release of The Satanic Verses was more signifier than significance. In a manner not dissimilar from most artists I've encountered, he redirected the topic from biographical occurrences to the research he conducted for his newest book, The Enchantress of Florence. Much to my delight, he took his time describing his research and the way that sometimes the uncanniness of the real trumps anything we might invent. He cited an event of which he read when the lions (who were meant to be released in the square where they would cause an entertaining spectacle of gore) were too bored to maul anyone. And the people were upset. Not only were the people upset, but the historians were, as well, enough so that they recorded this upheaval in mass recreation into the bank boxes of posterity, just waiting for us.
And then, there was one last push to the day. I went for postcolonial literary giantess to retro badass babes. Real Art Ways was hosting the Connecticut roller girls and screening the documentary Hell on Wheels. I squirmed during the film. I took about a hundred pictures after. And then, I had that instant flash of heat and sweat and the next thing I knew I was gripping the green room toilet.
I'll admit it. There is a part of me that hopes my sudden illness was a kind of Stendhal Syndrome (something I promise to adequately describe in a future post - there's a surprising paucity of material on the web about it...). I think you should probably judge me for this and I think I should have been much more hesitant to so readily admit it.
I went home and swaddled myself in the familiarity of handed down silk pajamas and the Gwyneth Paltrow Emma. What comfort was mine!
My friends alternate between calling me quirky and eccentric. That, I think, is as good a measure as anything.
Also: I have developed an unconventional relationship to popcorn since working at Real Art Ways.
Also, also: I like to oil my desk.
In the winter, I like to watch clemintine peels combust in the woodstove.
