on losing proust and finding bathrobes

Tags

finland, lost books, Proust, the summer book, tove jansson, writer's block, writing

my proust has gone missing.  perhaps.  or i stopped looking for it.  that’ll happen with proust.  he did come along to boston, in the carry on that stayed in the overhead compartment. (when baby fell asleep with his feet in my face sprawled across big brother it seemed too much to crawl out from the the human jenga pyramid and retrieve it.  i looked at skymall instead.).  he rode in the back of the jeep with the dog when we drove 365 miles to see a vet about a six month ear infection.  (he was passed over for pirate madlibs and a month of real simple menus).  and now i can’t remember how to even look for him.

i’m weary of the writing that rants about not being able to write.  weary, that is, of my quiet whine that writing is so difficult, so impossible to begin, particularly when one has been hoarding words and one starts to feel quite heavy with them and yet when one sits down to write the words scurry behind thoughts of second grade recess and volunteer art projects.  which, of course, is a red flag that the book, and one’s words must be found at all costs.

perhaps, though, if i write the book will come back.  it will float to me like the robe in tove janson‘s summer book.  

The robe had survived various threats to its existence.  There was the time some well-meaning relatives came out, and, as a surprise, gave the island a good cleaning.  They threw out a lot of things the family wanted, but, worst of all, they carried the bathrobe down to the water and let it float away.  They claimed later that it smelled.  Of course it smelled–that was part of its charm.  Smell is important.  It reminds a person of all the things he’s been through; it is a sheath of memories and security.  The robe smelled of good things, too–of smoke and the sea–but maybe they never noticed that.  In any case, the robe came back.  The wind blew, shifted, and reversed  the waves beat against the island, and one fine day they brought it home.  After that, it smelled of seaweed, and Papa wore virtually nothing else that whole summer.

of course as i write this, proust is with me, has been with me all along.  the memory of smell, the synaesthetic intermingling of sense and memory.  and as i write i am unburdened of these excess words, reminded that part of writing is wading along, walking on alligators. i’d been slowly savoring jansson’s book all summer long, wading about in the distilled island experiencing the dark, intense reverie that is particular to the finnish. (memories now of summolein strawberries, trams in the rain, travelling with a three year old in helsinki, adventures from another time).  (closer still, seashells shaped like velociraptor claws and the pop popping of seaweed bulbs underfoot.) but august slipped by and i was still reading well into fall, holding on to the long tides of the midnight sun.  proust was always in my bag, but jansson was at my bedside table.

i’ve shelved the summer book (and replaced it with jacob’s room) and i think proust will come back, if only as the smell of seaweed and the callous of barnacles on my bedside books.

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proust and the salt rose

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dense fragrance, fever, freud, lacan, literature, love sonnet xvii, moon pies, mother, nursing, pablo neruda, Proust, salt rose, sonnet xvii

my proust reading is slow, stolen reading. it seems fitting that the longest date marcel and i have had was last week when my 18 month old was on his second day of a 102 fever.  it was a saturday and we had out of town guests, so the big boys took them exploring in the city. while they ate moon pies in china town and hung off a cable car on powell street, i nursed a feverish baby in our dimmed bedroom.  we (the baby, proust and i) moved back and forth between the rocking chair and the unmade bed in tempo with the languid sentences of combray.

i first read proust when i was pregnant and my then-five year old was transitioning into a new room, a new bed by himself.  i remember my son creeping down the hall to climb into our bed just as i had turned the page on marcel’s disappointment that at last, mother has come to stay with him.  he yearns for it; his very existence depends on it; and yet her coming is a kind of betrayal, a disappointment.

both of these overlaps reminded me of neruda’s love sonnet xvii.

I don’t love you as if you were the salt-rose, topaz
or arrow of carnations that propagate fire:
I love you as certain dark things are loved,
secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom and carries
hidden within itself the light of those flowers,
and thanks to your love, darkly in my body
lives the dense fragrance that rises from the earth.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where,
I love you simply, without problems or pride:
I love you in this way because I don’t know any other way of loving

but this, in which there is no I or you,
so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand,
so intimate that when I fall asleep it is your eyes that close.

when writing my wedding vows over a decade ago i returned to this poem. and i married because of this, because i found a partner who understood the difference between alone and lonely. because i knew i could always sleep beside him and breathe his breath as my own. and that was love. it still is love.

but when i re-read it as a mother it no longer seemed to me the confession of the lover. this is womb love. die a thousand deaths love. hold you to my breast until i bleed love. think your poop is perfect love. count your eyelashes love. exponential love.

and that kind of love knocks you off your feet. leaves you prostrate, disoriented. that kind of love is the obsession of our narrator who knows not yet i or you.  this mother and son love is suffocating, annihilating, terrifying. it’s being attached, so tightly bound, so full of love you can’t breathe. and yet it’s liberating, exhilarating, and just beautiful.

i’ve returned to this poem often. i return to it now because i think neruda gives voice, as proust does,  in a way that honors the poetry and intensity of the underside of the salt rose. it indulges in the dark intimacy between mother and child. and it warns us that this love is no bouquet of common carnations.

freud and lacan tell us plenty about the role of the mother in a child’s psychosexual development.  and i find it difficult to make these connections between my own mothering and proust without lacan whispering in my ear… but i find it equally difficult to (literally as well as metaphorically) turn the pages without my sons’ breath over the page.

but for now, in the novel, in the sonnet, in my darkened room i’ll embrace the “dense fragrance” that rises between the space of the mother and child. and then i’ll turn the page.

Lie to me

Tags

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.