Lie to me

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Anais Nin, Aristotle, Berkeley, Henry, Henry Miller, In Search of Lost Time, Librarian, Libraries, lies, Marcel, Marcel Proust, Michael Bernstein, Proust

Portrait of Anais Nin taken in NYC in 70s by Elsa Dorfman (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve always loved liars.

Writers who speak in hyperbole and whose pages are bursting with extraordinary exaggeration are totally my cup of tea. Like love stories. And war stories. Stories about childhood and politics and everything in-between. Especially, when guised as the truth. Especially when cloaked for the sake of story.

And speaking such, I want to share a story with you. It’s not mine that much is true. I came across it in the stacks of the periodical room, back when journals were bound twice yearly with thick leather backs and kept in rooms called libraries. I used to work in one such magical place. I was the assistant librarian in the Periodical, Newspaper, and Microfiche room at the Doe Library of UC Berkeley. I loved my job. And in ways most bibliophiles can understand, I miss that job more than I miss my youth. Because for me that job was my youth. It was paper and newsprint and dusty stacks of words that I would turn when I was supposed to be shelving or referencing or otherwise amending. But like every other assistant librarian, every volume I shelved was a volume I read. So there I was in the belly of the basement of PNM–while the microfiche machines hummed and clinking nickels made Xerox copies– reading serialized love stories of Henry and June. I will not lie. I do not remember who wrote it. I do not remember what journal or even what year. I am a bad librarian. But I remember the words:

There is a hotel in Paris, above a café, of course, where Anais Nin and Henry Miller met for the first time and then made their way up to room 41. They brought along a picture of June, I swear to God they did, and they set it on the nightstand, (or perhaps it was already there). What they did next biographers are uncertain, but it involved most definitely Anais, Henry and Henry’s jacket. In Henry’s version he took the jacket off, laid it on the bed and Anais, naked lay upon it. In Anais’ version Henry took off all his clothes and wore the coat on top of both the bed and the woman. In June’s version the jacket was on the floor, out of June’s sight. Henry and Anais made love on top of it. Anais wore black lace underwear and when they were finished, Henry did a somersault on the bed and said to Anais, What? You expected more brutality?

Before they met they had agreed to be platonic. Six days earlier, March 2, in a letter, Anais had sworn to Henry with silver ink on purple paper:  The woman will sit eternally in the tall black armchair. I will be the one woman you will never have. Excessive living weighs down the imagination. We will not live, we will only write and talk and sail the swells. Writers make love to what they need. 

Writers make love to the truth they need.

And in truth, the jacket is why I write.

I’m looking for a way, as Aristotle states, to tell not what really happened, but what could possibly happen. As with Aristotle’s description of Homer, I find it enormously reassuring that the poet (or in this case the novelist) can construct a plot around the elements of periphery, recognition and pathos and yet can begin not with the start of history or story, but somewhere in the middle causing events to naturally follow. As historian, David Thelen puts it, “people shape their recollections of the past to fit their present needs.” In no place is this more true, or more startlingly confounding, than in the pages of Proust.

I came to Proust fully and exclusively. By this I mean in the early winter of 1999, I read everything. I did not read an excerpt, nor did I stop with Swann’s Way. Rather I read all seven volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. It was indulgent, selfish, and, according to my financial aid advisor, it was also a “terrible waste of money.” But it was also totally worth it. The only class I took that semester, “Proust” was taught by a short and brilliant Berkeley professor named Michael Bernstein, who got violently ill during the course of the semester, and reminded me, with his scant height and complaints of pneumonia of Marcel himself.

Marcel, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time, lives in a world of constructed reality, just as much, if not more than he lives in the actual world itself. He spends chapters revealing his fantastic expectations of the most ordinary events (a theater performance, an outing to the sea, a rendezvous with a woman) only to be devastatingly disappointed when the reality comes to fruition.

However, when he is not allowed to speculate on the outcome of a particular event, when things happen or come to him by accident, he is able to enjoy himself fully in the moment. I maintain this is because when he is allowed to speculate on an upcoming event, he is able to project the bulk of his emotional state onto the object of which he desires.

This behavior inevitably sets Marcel up for disappointment as nothing can ever live up to his grand expectations, simply because he has invested so much mental time (so much story imagining) in exploring their every aspect.

Conversely, when the experience is presented to him without his being forewarned, he is unable to endow the encounter with preconceived notions and the moment happens to him spontaneously. He is then able to experience life without meditation, or what Proust refers to as happiness.

Perhaps the most famous incident of spontaneous accident in Proust is when Marcel dunks a madeleine into a spoonful of tea and is abruptly flooded with unconstrained emotion. Not only does the memory of the cookie itself return, but so too does Marcel’s entire childhood home of Combray. Through the accidental trigger of sense memory Marcel is allowed access into a state of being that has been previously inaccessible to his present self. Due to the “madeleine accident,” he is allowed access to a brief “paradise of adolescence” that can only be revisited by chance, (in this case the delicate combination of the madeleine cookie and tisane).

This instance brings Marcel intense “happiness” and “exquisite pleasure,” but as the narrator attempts to repeat the “accident” with a second mouthful, hoping again to experience an emotional flood, he “find[s] nothing more than in the first.”  When he makes a third attempt it gives him even less than the second and he declares, “It is time to stop; the potion is losing its virtue,” (Overture 61).

Although at first the combination brought Marcel great joy, when he intentionally tries to repeat the process he finds it brings him nothing. This is because the pleasure of the emotion occurred precisely because it was unplanned, hence accidental.

Being both the “quester” and the creator of the quest, Marcel wants, not only to rediscover a lost past, but he also wants to recreate it as well; he wants to both create the lie and be lied to. Or, more simply it is only after we revisits the past that we are able to derive meaning from who we were and establish the narrative hyperbole of who we currently are.

As noted previously, the only drawback to this kind of logic is that according to Proust, the past can only be revisited in spontaneous “moments” of accidental chance, thus leaving Marcel in a perpetual cycle of desire and possession. Leaving poor Proust and his willing reader with a fat stack of glorious half-truths; a steaming pile of glittery lies.

I don’t care much for madeleines. I drink my tea with my best friend’s biscotti, but tell me a story worth holding on to and I’ll keep your cookies in my jacket pocket until they are nothing but crumbles. And when even the crumbs are washed out with rain or dry cleaning machines, I’ll keep the memory dunked in tisane exactly as you told it. Which is to say, exactly as I need it to sound.

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Proust and Being in the Present

Tags

future, memory, past, present, remembrance

Proust’s tome is, quite obviously, a kind of tracking of how the human memory works, certainly a fascinating topic.  I’d venture to say that most of us don’t really understand how we as individuals retrieve memories, the function that memories serve in our lives, how our minds process memory, or how our memories are modified over time.  As the remake of the film Total Recall has recently been released, these kinds of questions seem maybe even more relevant to popular culture.  And yet, I’m led to wonder whether Proust’s (and admittedly, my own) obsession with memory is actually a kind of obstacle to being in the present.

I know that I too often become so caught up in either replaying the past or worrying about the future that I am unable to fully engage in and fully enjoy the present.  Proust remembers to the ways that worry about the future can steal the joy of the present in the moment when the narrator’s child self, although longing for mother’s goodnight kiss, find’s her approach for the kiss a “painful moment” because “it announced the moment that would follow it, in which she had left me.”  He is unable to embrace the experience he longs for, because it heralds the moment he fears, the moment of loss.  Worry about the future removes him from the present.

It seems also that Proust and his narrator and maybe even ourselves as readers experience a similar loss of the present as we delve into the world of memory explored by this novel.  We tread the passages of the narrator’s memory, never quite sure where the present is that he inhabits.  Memory takes over all, obscuring the present.  This is fine for a novel, but it is no way to live our lives.  And yet, when we live with loss and emotional hurt, it is easy to slip into living our lives among memory and the fallout of memory, rather than in the present.

Additionally, in pursuing relationships, I think it’s easy to slip into the position that the child takes above.  We long for the kiss, long for the emotional connection to another, yet it is easy to fear it, even push it away because we know that connection always already creates the possibility of loss and suffering.  How easy, then, to miss out on something lovely and wonderful and fulfilling in the present simply because we fear a potential future, one that may never even come to pass.  It’s almost as though we remember something that hasn’t even happened.

the virtue of writing (and sleeping) without a magic lamp

Tags

habit, little miss sunshine, momentum, sleep, writing

i find i’m back at the beginning again, lamenting my lack of momentum.  admitedly, my copy of proust had gone the way of lost things. . .

and so i returned to the first page.  the first line. again. and again.  and it struck me that there was a deliberate play against momentum.  that proust had tricked me.  here i was trying to pedal faster, forge ahead, and yet the narrator is trying desperately to fight against such movement.  all he really wants to do is sleep.  in fact, 46 pages after the opening we return to: “So it was that, for a long time, when, awakened at night, I remembered Combray again [. . .]”.  Not only are we still in the digression of sleep but the very writing itself dictates you yield, slow down.  Look, for example, at that sentence–the one returning to that first line (when you think you’d travelled so very very far–of course “far” has nothing at all to do with momentum:  see d.’s brillig last post about the mind-body travelling) which is punctuated with a comma at a frequency of no less than every four words, forcing you into a lilting, somnumbulent pace.

In fact, you might even say that momentum is the anathema to sleep. Such is the disturbance of the magic lantern:

it replaced the opacity of the walls with impalpable irrideescences, supernatural multicoloured apparations, where laegends were depicted as in a wavering, momentary stained-glass window.  But my sadness was only increased by theis, because the mere change in lighting destroyed the familiarity my bedroom had acquired for me and which the torment of going to bed, had made it tolerable to me. (13)

So this beautiful distraction, placed atop his lamp each night at dinner, rather than creating a magical room of slumber actually aggravated the anxiety of sleep so that each night he felt as if he were in an unfamiliar place “to which I had come for the first time straight from the railway train” (13). What he desires is familiarity and habit.

What is difficult about writing is this word by word, belabored process that despite all of the magic lamps available : voice-command activated software, wordpress apps so i can post at stoplights, touchscreens and autospell they perhaps only obfuscate the simplicity of the act itself.  Whether pen or click you still write word by word, erase or delete, edit and write again, clumsily until you find your way home.

Instead of bemoaning my lack of momentum, perhaps Proust can teach me to return to writing as a kind of habit.  But I know this, and I think we all know this: it’s not momentum but habit that gets writing done.  There is truth to glib titles like “writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day” (another book that had also gone the way of lost things) and my dissertation director’s advice that all a grad student needs is glue–for sitting in the writing chair day after day.   There’s truth to that: seven years and two children later my own was finished not out of creating a magical solitary writer’s retreat but by writing daily, in the midst of the familiar chaos so that it became a habit as mundane as washing dishes. (And like sleep, it’s as important as those pesky dishes.)

Today is Wednesday, and I have commited to posting on Wednesdays and I’ve committed to carrying the book with me again (even if it creeps back under the seat with lost Lego bricks, Joe’s O’s and Peet’s coffee sleeves). I cannot guarantee a brilliant discourse on the virtues of Proust (but then we’ve all seen Little Miss Sunshine and know what happens to “real” Proust scholars winkwink) and I may only offer  a passage, a line, a word that inspires; for he craved not the magical sleep of disorientation:”it was enough if , in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely” (9).

Proust and the Mind-Body Connection

Tags

body, Combray, memory

So I realize that, as is so often the case with me, this is very much a personal response.  And even so, my hope is that others may find some value in it, even if I’m speaking from my own heart, from my own experience, rather than from the kind of Apollonian position so often valued by academe.

Would it be too much to say that it’s become a cliche to say that Proust has been identified as a neuroscientist?  Not that I actually know anything about such matters.  But as I’m reading the early pages of the “Combray” section, I’m fascinated by the ways in which Proust explores not just the nature of memory and its connection to the material world but its connection to the physical body.  And in the interest of disclosure I suppose I should admit this–lately I’ve been thinking quite a lot not just about the mind-body connection but even more specifically about the ways in which the physical body is connected to and reflective of one’s emotional life.  And it’s as though on pages 9 and 10, the physical body for Proust’s narrator becomes not just a way of locating the memory but of locating the self within a set of possible memories.  Memory and construction of the self become embodied in a very literal way.

Specifically,  the narrator describes the sense of disorientation he has sometimes felt upon waking, a disorientation that manifests as knowing neither where nor who he is:  “[W]hen I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was. . . ”  I have no idea whether I’m unique in this experience, but I certainly (and more frequently than I would like) have had the experience of waking, even in my own bed, and thinking I’m in my own bed, but my own bed at another address, my own bed of another era.  It’s quite disconcerting and can even lead to feelings of sadness and loss when I momentarily think that I’m in some earlier version of my life in which some relationship, now lost, was still available to me.

What I find particularly fascinating, however, about this experience of disorientation and dislocation for Proust’s narrator is that the physical body and its position in bed becomes a way to attempt to locate and define the self.  It’s as though the experience of having a body allows access both to memory and to the sense of self, which are arguably intertwined.  The narrator explains that his “body, too benumbed to move, would try to locate, according to the form of its fatigue, the position of its limbs in order to deduce from this the direction of the wall, the location of the furniture, in order to reconstruct and name the dwelling in which it found itself.  Its memory, the memory of its ribs, its knees, its shoulders, offered in succession several of the rooms where it had slept. . .”  Its as though the memory, and the attendant sense of self, is located within the body, rather than the mind in this passage.  Upon waking, the attempt to deduce one’s physical location, earlier tied to the attempt to remember one’s own identity, is permitted by the position and the “memory” of the physical body.

One theory that I’m willing to buy into is that we somehow carry emotional traumas in our physical bodies–  that even if our conscious minds don’t remember the emotional traumas, the tightness in our shoulders or the pain in our stomachs bear witness to our own suffering.  Proust must have understood this–that the body carries its own memories, memories that may be separate from those of the conscious mind.  These embodied memories, however, are particularly powerful precisely because we cannot access them via the conscious mind, and yet we carry them, quite literally, around with us day by day.