by Lydia Davis
Or is this impression produced by the force of my desire, now that it is too late, to tell her what those early days of her teaching now mean to me? Including the textbook, which I can’t find anywhere?
Or is it that when one reaches a certain age of being older than so many people (becoming an elder), instead of being younger than so many (having so many elders), one wishes to bring back a figure who was not only much older but also a teacher, therefore an appointed guide and guardian, in at least one area (the French language)? Is it because, at the age I am now, one’s guides and teachers, one’s guardians, appointed and unappointed, are dropping away, every day?
* * *
The French grammar is called Le Français par la méthode directe by Robin and Bergeaud. It is a slim book with a red cover, published back in 1941 by Librairie Hachette, and I have been looking everywhere for a copy, even in poor condition.
* * *
We focus always, and over and over each day, on the details of our particularity (I love his particular handwriting whenever I see it) when we (and it all) are really just happenstantial (we love what we come to love, but we might easily never have come to it: I would love his Bronx accent, but he doesn’t have one). Am I more lovable, objectively, than that young Hasidic woman standing in the subway car? If I were objectively more lovable, then that young Hasidic man gazing at her so raptly would love me instead. No, even that statement is not true: I could be objectively more lovable and he could still love her instead.
* * *
My impression is that almost any one poem of William Bronk’s that I could find would say what I am thinking so many of his poems say—what I prefer to remember and think they say—but that is not quite true.
LIVING INSTEAD
Nothing much we can do about it so we live
the way old bones and fossils lived, the way
long-buried cities lived: we live instead
—just as if and even believing that here
and finally now, ours could be the real world.
This is not quite the thought I was after: I quote it “instead.”
* * *
There are certain things I think I “ought to” remember, if I am to be a responsible representative of my time and generation, but where there should be a memory there is often a blank. Commonest example I keep returning to: the Bay of Pigs. I never wanted to remember anything about it. The Cuban Missile Crisis. I erased understanding of these “current” events even as I learned about them. I wanted to wipe the slate clean. To have a “clear mind”? How to have a clean slate and still have a reliable memory bank for reference, and be responsible to succeeding generations?
* * *
Hypogeum: the subterranean part of an ancient building. The doubled remove in that idea.
One who shares a past with you loses his memory entirely: What happens to you, the you that he held in his memory? That past is suddenly wiped out, or in danger of being wiped out, or rendered meaningless, or less meaningful, or even more accidental (unnecessary) than it was. If suddenly only you remember it, because Father does not (Father sitting there in his plastic chair with his mouth open). As though it were a geometrical figure that has lost its depth, its third dimension, the legs it stood on.
* * *
This memory of mine could be exchanged for any other memory of mine. Any other person’s memory, even. Let me tell you something I remember from my childhood: and this is not true, it is someone else’s memory, or a story I read that someone else made up. It is fiction. You hear it as my memory. That does not matter; you take it as my memory. Even I may not know it is not mine.
* * *
Past gone, like a building gone, or a tree.
A building is gone, leaving no trace on the ground, especially no trace in the air—of course—and yet up there, in the air, many lives unfolded.
And then with a certain belief in magic, we think lives that unfolded within walls have left physical traces on those stones, and is that why we pick up a shard of stone from a ruin, or a handful of soil from Greece, and take it away in our pocket? Is it just a belief in magic, or a superstition? Is it laughable?
What about the man who has a fireplace he has built himself incorporating a stone from every state in the continental United States? It is in some sense magical for him, full of potency—those stones are more than ordinary stones in a “fieldstone” fireplace. But they have no intrinsic value, and to someone who doesn’t know, they have no value: here comes the wrecker and scatters and shatters the stones, the one from Arizona over there and the one from South Dakota here, gone. They have value only for the builder, who knows them, who has invested them with value. The way we invest our pets with personality, character, with a larger personality and character than a stranger can see, upon first meeting our pet.
A tree is taken down. It leaves no trace in the air, though it was up there in that air for so many years, often a hundred or more.
The vegetable garden that was planted in the same place by this roadside every year is not planted anymore because the gardener grew too old and too feeble. So there is just another twelve-foot square of lawn now, along with the rest of the lawn. The third dimension—the growth several feet up into the air—and the complexity, the tangle and chaos, the richness, the sumptuousness, is gone now.
* * *
On the top floor, this time, a floor with lower ceilings, the servants’ floor, of a house on Gardner Street in Providence: open the doors of a cabinet, pull out a drawer, lift the cover from a box, and there you see stones labeled as coming from places in Egypt, in Greece, other countries (Persia?), collected many decades ago, even a century ago, by this monied family traveling abroad.
But having said this, I am not sure the house was on Gardner Street after all, or even if there is such a street. I am sure, though, of the cabinet and the stones and the wealthy family.
Was that top floor the part of the house equivalent to rationality, or to memory?
* * *
If you don’t know that this house here was Mozart’s birthplace, you are not interested, even though you, a great lover of Mozart, walk right past it.
If you do know, you stand before it filled with a number of emotions and thoughts, including awe.
On the other hand, if you have made a mistake and are standing in front of the wrong house thinking it was Mozart’s house, your thoughts and emotions are exactly the same as if you stood in front of the correct house. Are they just as valuable? You will come back from your trip abroad and tell someone about the experience—your thoughts and emotions included—and that experience will make a difference to you as your life goes on, and will perhaps make a difference to the person or the many people you tell about your experience in front of Mozart’s house, and it won’t matter that it was the wrong house. It won’t matter unless you find out it was the wrong house. Then, in your own eyes, you will feel you did not really have the experience you thought you had. Your experience was false, and had no value.
The example of Mozart’s house is not a good example, because it must have a plaque on it, and even perhaps colorful banners, and crowds going in and out. But there are other houses that are unmarked, the former habitations of other much-loved people. And there are other places in front of which we have stood, feeling awe, that will never be given plaques, such as the stationery shop in Paris where Samuel Beckett used to buy his note cards. “That man put his foot on this very threshold, at one time,” you say to yourself.
* * *
Not only that the dead are still alive, but also, sometimes, the conviction that the past still exists. But I can’t tell if this is because I am so fully imagining it (and have returned so often in my imagination to the same place and time) or because it “really” still exists—not in “our” space and time, but in some other dimension.
* * *
It has been quite a few years that I have been looking, sporadically, for my early friend Mary and for that grammar book with
the red cover. Now I have found out where both of them are, though I haven’t yet contacted my friend and do not yet have the grammar book in my possession. I have the address of one, and, of the other, the many pages constituting a xeroxed copy. Paper, again, is replacing or standing in for the real thing, or signaling the real thing, or providing me with a handy reminder of the real thing. Though of course one of the real things, in this case, is itself largely paper.
* * *
Why do I want the past (the material contained in my memory) to live on in the present? Why do I want evidence of it now? And why do I want someone else to know, too? Why am I not content to leave it where it is and remember it in solitude? Revisit it from time to time? This time it is a dining room with massive dark furniture in Vienna, and there is a block puzzle on the dining room table, brought out for my benefit, as I was then, a seven-year-old? It could also be the ripe cherries from the cherry trees in the enclosed back garden of a house in Graz, and the garden itself. Are the memories of “foreign” experiences more concentrated and more potent for me because these experiences were so unlike what I grew up with before and after, or because they were so much richer, sensually and maybe also emotionally? And if you give a child a certain experience (as of the desert in the American Southwest) that he can’t repeat every day (living in the East in a town with lush vegetation in the summer), do you create something inside him (in the form of a memory but also, perhaps, of an unsatisfied desire) that he will want to return to the rest of his life?
* * *
The carton I happen to rest my feet on, under my desk, could also be considered to contain a thick pile of thin sheets of memory—since each piece of paper (a miscellany thrown in there and not examined for years), or almost each one, yields a bit of memory or large piece of memory and along with the memory an emotion—a faint emotion or a stronger emotion. But unexamined, it is (in the carton) all potential—like potential energy (the ball at the top of the incline, if I am remembering correctly the physics lesson) as opposed to kinetic energy, as I studied this, with difficulty, in the very large, light-filled classroom on a hilltop in Vermont, under the guidance of a physics and chemistry teacher whom I remember well, though he does not remember me. (And he said something about me at the time that I have kept in mind and returned to regularly all these years, and that helps me to define myself, and yet he does not know who this woman in front of him is, and cannot, even with all the help in the world, revive any image of her as a girl.)
From all the sheets of paper—so thin as to be virtually two-dimensional—arise three-dimensional scenes visible only to me.
* * *
Speak, Memory, by Nabokov, in which the raw matter of his memory was developed and refined by the efflorescence of his language into more than it ever was in itself. He did not remember as much as he said. The memories grew in his language.
* * *
I go to a place—to Montaillou, for instance—and I am going “back” there, even though I have never been there before, because I have been there so often in imagination. I find only momentary, and tiny, traces of the past I am looking for. I find a treeless hillside with cow paths or sheep paths worn on it, as so often imagined by me while I read the book I so love, about Montaillou, but at the next turn there is a development of modern “villas.” There is no abundance, no richness, of remnants of the past but only remnants so nearly crowded out or extinguished by the present, by constructions of the present, that they have no more life in them, or almost none; they are defeated and nearly dead.
A certain life force prevails that can be destroyed, extinguished, by encroachment. On a hillside not far from here, a small treeless cemetery outlined in stone, within an irregular rectangular stone wall, had kept its life force, its magic, until a car wash (though such a relatively tasteful one) was built a little too close to it—not right up against it, but within the same purview. Magic gone. As though the cemetery had been fatally “insulted.” Degradation.
* * *
A thing can be killed by its very preservation. Killed by the care to preserve it. Interruption, forever, of its growth, its coming into being, its death, in other words its own and owned life cycle. Preservation implying that it has no life force of its own any longer but needs outside help to remain in existence, to remain in the world (not “alive,” though). So that even if a bit of preserved “forest” remains here, something very important to it has died: its own force of being, its own insistence, without help.
* * *
Similarly, that those pieces of stone or wall, labeled with handwritten labels as coming from this or that particular place along the tour, should remain in the cupboard or cabinet on the top floor of the house of the wealthy old family, though the family no longer lives there but has donated the house to the university, rather than in a museum or other place of formal exhibit, allows them to keep their life: that there is no rope around them, that they are still resting in a place that was natural for them to remain in, at the top of the house, in a drawer, carefully preserved but only as the family would preserve them, not the museum, allows them to continue the natural cycle or progression of their life.
* * *
There is an old woman in black, in long skirts, sitting in the sun in a doorway in a small hilltop village in France. You are almost embarrassed to see her there as you pass the bottom of the street and look up at the sunny housefronts, because she seems to be an imitation of an old woman in black in a hilltop village; there are no more women like that now, knitting in the sun, as there were for hundreds of years, as well as women in black skirts sweeping their front steps; by now they have all been so depicted and overdepicted, so memorialized, that surely they do not exist any longer, so where did this one come from?
* * *
Memories creating three-dimensional space—recent memories shallow space, older memories deeper space, oldest memories deepest space—(and there is Mary in most mysterious Africa). The mind like a house—or an apartment, to a city dweller. In the house, there is attic and basement, in the apartment there are the farthest—most remote—rooms, unsuspected, around corners, down hallways, always another where you thought the apartment ended: this being a recurring dream for years, I thought due to my (real) frustration wanting at last an apartment large enough, now (the dream still recurring) having a house, but wanting a larger house, large enough, at last; but “large enough,” I realize now, meaning containing rooms that stay empty, that are not used and not even furnished; but perhaps, all this time, that dream not reflecting any reality but only symbolizing the mind, the mind needing another room and yet another, rooms scarcely known, rooms mostly empty, filled mostly as yet with light and air and some dust (dust being their own sign of a naturally continuing life, a too-clean room having its own natural life interrupted).
The apartment has depth on a single level, horizontally (two-dimensional), while the house has depth vertically (three-dimensional). The mind in fact more like the apartment because I am reaching out for things horizontally.
* * *
“Remember the Van Wagenens.” Father’s memory is mostly gone. Mother is still alive, with a good memory, but someday, only my brother, besides me, will know what this phrase means.
The Van Wagenens lived below us in that apartment building. We stamped and stomped, and were reminded that we were not alone in the building. I want to say to someone else, now, when he stamps and stomps, “Remember the Van Wagenens!” and I am sad that he won’t understand. But why am I sad? Why do I want him to know about the Van Wagenens? And why couldn’t I say “Remember the Harrises” or “Remember the Smiths” and give it the same meaning? Say that the Harrises or Smiths were our neighbors downstairs. Only my brother, eventually, would know I was not telling the truth. But why does the truth matter?
When we did not stomp, but only shouted, we were reminded to remember the old woman next door; in an earlier building, it was the old couple next door. Now I have forgotten their names. My broth
er will probably remember. He does not often—though he does sometimes, to my keen pleasure—reveal new memories, when I apply to him for memories of our family life, but he also does not usually forget old ones.
* * *
On television, someone says, approximately (I do not remember the exact words), “As we grow older, we can’t help but believe that the dead, in some way, live on.” This was in the movie made from E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, though it has taken me a moment to remember that.
* * *
Odorous early-morning fogs—in Graz or in Nottingham. I experience something like it today, or rather the two elements separately but simultaneously—mist in the hills out the window of the bus and at the same time a smell of some sort of fuel burning—and there is a deep physical desire in me to leap back into that fog, especially the fog of the Austrian early-morning streets with trolley tracks running through them. Wanting to go back into that past and into the past more generally, why? Because it is not full of the unknown, as the future is? Or because it is richer, sensually richer, as each succeeding year, in these times, in this country anyway, becomes poorer, sensually? More uniformity (less variety); cleaner people (fewer smells); more plastic surgery and better health (fewer physical deformities and “imperfections”); more television (less singing, dancing, playing on musical instruments, storytelling, communal cooking, gossiping); more “conveniences” (less labor of certain kinds, including cooking with its smells and tastes); more uniformity of speech (less dialect, less eccentricity of thought and behavior, fewer family expressions); more paving and construction (less wildlife, less wilderness, less vegetation); fewer kitchen gardens (neater properties, more clipping and cutting, less planting and growing); less backyard raising of poultry (fewer stinks and squawks, less mud); fewer backyard clotheslines (less flapping and snapping of large white sheets).
