The First Paragraph

I’ve read the first paragraph of The Way by Swann’s over and over.  It’s not so much that I can’t get beyond the first paragraph; it’s more that I’m not sure I want to right now.  Because there’s something almost indulgent in pouring over the same words and phrases over and over, weighing each one, listening to the sounds, imagining myself into the words.  In fact, I’m almost tempted, rather than draft my own post, to merely retype the opening paragraph for the pure joy of pouring over the words in another kind of way.  But I will refrain, because that seems like it would be slipping into the self-indulgent.  And yet, maybe Proust is about giving ourselves permission to be self-indulgent or at least to indulge our creative selves.

The passage that is lodging itself into my soul is this: “[I]t seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between Francois I and Charles V.  This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes. . .”  Here the narrator describes the experience of having fallen asleep while reading, although not necessarily realizing he’s asleep.  And certainly, part of what speaks to me here is this notion of the very fine between sleep and wakefulness, akin to the division we like to create between the conscious and the nonconscious.  But maybe Proust is reminding us that these seemingly-neat dichotomies (waking / sleep; conscious / nonconscious) are false idols.  For the experience of being human is a messy one, and to live fully means that these boundaries sometimes become blurred.

More specifically, the boundary between “real” and fiction, between the self and what we read is similarly blurred, at least for some of us.  We like to pretend that fiction, because it’s fiction, doesn’t matter, when the reality is that fiction has the power of myth to convey some essential Truth, possibly more “real” than the material world around us.  And the books that we read, at least for some of us who are book-oriented, become parts of our very souls.  Maybe Proust’s narrator has the experience of feeling as though he becomes “what the book was talking about” because he’s engaging on a deep imaginative level, one more easily entered into when one is near the line that we think divides sleep and wakefulness.  But maybe he becomes “what the book was talking about” because, like any serious reader, what he reads becomes part of who he is.

Either way, I’m ready to read and dream Proust, while I’m ready to dream and write my own story.  And I’m ready to allow the books I read as well as the narratives I construct to become my very self.

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And I Digress. . .

I just realized, just now, that it’s been just over two months since my last post.  Why am I having such trouble with Prousting?  I have my copy of Proust.  I carry him with me everywhere I go.  In the pool blue tote bag that holds my notebooks and multi-colored roller ball pens, possibly my most prized possessions, I have my copy of The Way by Swann’s carefully tucked away.  And just carrying him around with me seems like I’m moving in the right direction.  But the question remains:  why can’t I get any reading actually done?  Why can’t I get a coherent post drafted?  We can talk about Proustian digressions in writing and thought.  But what happens when our lives become a Proustian digression?

I mean, here I am, nearly 37 years old.  And in one way, I suppose I’m quite accomplished.  I have a PhD; I have tenure at a college that I have come to love.  Isn’t this what we wanted when we all signed up for grad school?  Wasn’t this the result we sought?  And yet, it all feels like a digression from what I thought would be my “real” life.  I though I’d get married, have babies, host dinner parties where I’d wear high heels and serve fancy drinks.  Instead, I find myself making a pot of soup for my single friends as we gather to watch bad, bad reality TV.  Today, I’m happy to have these friends, happy to be cooking for them, but there are still moments when all of this feels like a digression from the life I thought I was supposed to have.  And yet THAT life, the one I was “suppposed” to have, the one I see my friends from college living week to week, it really wouldn’t suit me, not any more.  I wouldn’t have the time and space to think and read and write (and yes, watch reality TV) the way that I want to.  And so, the digression has become my real life.  I have learned to be reconciled to this somehow.  The digression has become my life, my real life.  What feels like the digression is the life I’m really meant to have, not the one somebody else always told me I was “supposed” to have.

But the other digression is this:  I intend to write.  Every day, I intend to write, and most days, I get some sort of writing done, often just brain dump in my personal journal.  But that’s OK; it’s still writing.  Still, I wonder why I can’t manage to write myself back round to Proust.  I’ve read the opening paragraphs over and over, thinking about sleep, about my own issues with sleep, about the experience of sleeping even when we think we aren’t.  As someone who struggles night to night with insomnia, I’m certain I’m hyper-sensitive about sleep and how to sleep and how much to sleep and when I’m sleeping and when I’m not.  And right now, it seems to me that Proust’s opening, “For a long time, I went to bed early,” invites us to consider the ways in which the acts of reading and writing and themselves a kind of somnolence or even a kind of somabulation (and I truly hope that’s the right word).  As I’m writing, drafting this very post, am I merely a sleep walker?

Julie Andrew’s “Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start” is so much, in my mind, tied to the Red King’s admonition to “start at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, then stop,” and forgive me if I’ve misquoted Lewis Carroll at all.  It’s just that sitting down and starting at the beginning is so hard to do, especially when there’s so much to distract us in our lives and in our brains.  Later in Carroll’s Alice works, Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee suggest that Alice may merely exist as part of someone else’s dream.  Alice is simultaneously incredulous, indignant, and frightened by this suggestion, as well she should be.  And yet, I feel as though writing about literature, writing about Proust is somehow only becoming part of his dream, part of his experience of going to bed early at Combray.  How do I feel about this?  I don’t know.

I want to claim my own voice, to live my own life and break out of the digressions.

Julie and Joyce

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James Joyce, Julie Andrews, metempsychosis, Molly Bloom, remembrance, soliloquy

My six year old’s first grade class is preparing for their musical medley of The Sound of Music so we listen to Julie Andrews in the car, sing do re mi in the bath, and try to master the tongue twister of the lonely goatherd over dinner.  The refrain, though, that keeps going through my mind is “Let’s start at the very beginning… a very good place to start.” But of course I keep thinking “When you read” [insert Proust] “you begin with”. . . “metempsychosis.”

At least that’s where I’ve been stuck, or struck, rather.  Because if I can finally put down my red pen and get past Pendergrast’s introduction this is my first pause… my first Proustian digression and I haven’t even read halfway down the first page.  I love how spitzspeak confesses: “I can be intimidated by Proust and embrace Proust at the same time.  I can allow Proust to invade me, and I can read my life through the lens of Proust at the same time.”   Because when I got there I remembered my graduate seminar on Ulysses and spending 90 minutes on Bloom’s mis-remembering “metempsychosis.  Which, of course, reminded me of an afternoon in Dublin rather un-romantically marchimg in circles with cryptic instructions from the anti-frommers travel guide on how to get to the spot where Molly Bloom said yes yes and had the seedcake kiss. . . perhaps one of the most romantic moments in twentieth century literature :

the sun shines for you he said the day we were lying among the rhododendrons on Howth head in the grey tweed suit and his straw hat the day I got him to propose to me yes first I gave him the bit of seedcake out of my mouth and it was leapyear like now yes 16 years ago my God after that long kiss I near lost my breath yes he said was a flower of the mountain yes so we are flowers all a woman’s body yes that was one true thing he said in his life and the sun shines for you today yes that was why I liked him because I saw he understood or felt what a woman is and I knew I could always get round him and I gave him all the pleasure I could leading him on till he asked me to say yes and I wouldn’t answer first only looked out over the sea and the sky I was thinking of so many things he didn’t know of  . . . and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.

Of course in the ellipses are Molly’s digressions–memories of former lovers and her girlhood–because one thing is never one thing.  And of course the walk through the brambles and the bushes with my lover was anything but romantic.  Are you sure we’re supposed to walk up this hill with the red flower that’s been trampled? Or do we go past that tree with the lopped off limb and turn right?. So when we finally dropped our picnic blanket and wearily agreed this must be the spot and I  read from my (now feeling rather heavy) copy of  Ulysses sure that  this rather  dilapitated view of Dublin couldn’t possibly be it I kissed m. anyway for enduring the academic treasure hunt.  (Which of course leads now to a new hunt as I look through old boxes for my Dublin scrapbook–photographic evidence that we were there, proof I could post and in the absence of my dog-eared novel a google search for “molly bloom seedcake” which leads me here to another writer’s post) And of course I realize that that spot doesn’t really exist, not off the page anyhow, as a place on the map, as a verifiable truth,  but is so incredibly powerful because the memory of that moment keeps Molly and Bloom connected and (to borrow Woolf’s language from Mrs. Dalloway) connects them as through a thread to the rest of  Dublin and its history through time and space in the powerful nexus of remembrance.  The way by Swann’s will indeed be the long way around. . .