by Lydia Davis
* * *
Memory as distortion—I read something and remember it slightly wrong because what it actually said suggested a certain thought, somewhat related but not the same, something I wanted it to say, something I had been thinking, or wanted to think.
* * *
Then there is the memory of a thought or sequence of thoughts: as I walked past this particular spot two weeks ago, this thought unfolded—it was moderately interesting at the time (kept me mildly entertained or occupied for the twenty seconds it took to unfold as I walked past this building), but not interesting at all, now, the second time; there is nothing left to do with it. Walking past the same spot again now, as the same sequence begins its procession, I forcibly stop it. The most interesting thoughts (or thoughts that continue to be interesting) turn out to be the tricky problems that are not solved after only one or two ruminations (why did Layman P’ang put his head on the knee of his disciple when it came time for P’ang to die?).
(Another puzzle: the case of the man I read about in the newspaper who took a vow not to speak on Sundays—the fact that his perceptions were so much clearer. Was this because his “self” did not get in the way of his perceptions? Our speech so often bringing our intruding selves into the scene. Open Mouth Already a Mistake. A title enjoyed in itself over and over again, but also a good book, and also a good thing to remember.)
* * *
What was misheard, at a meeting: “breadth and depth” mistaken for another pair of contrasts or contrasting dimensions, “breath and death.” But the question is: When we do not mis-hear, when we correctly understand, do we not still hear the other words at the same time, though we may not consciously acknowledge this?
* * *
Memory: When you have a chance to compare, as you don’t always, or very often, what you remember with the actual thing itself, there are almost always differences, some vast, some small—the very distinctly visualized page of that grammar book, with the lovely simple illustration at the top and the paragraph of simple narrative text below, and then below that the lovely simple double list of vocabulary, including, in the first lesson, pupitre, cahier, and crayon, is not after all quite the same as the actual page of the actual grammar book when I finally see it. Close, but not exactly the same, as Mlle Roser’s face and figure are close but not exactly the same. (As our memory of a sentence of something read—so important to us that we refer to it in our own thinking quite often—may be close but not the same as the actual sentence, and sometimes crucially different, not the same thought at all.) And this necessarily means that we live closeted with, hedged in by, hosts and scores, sequences, chains, lines of memories all inaccurate.
* * *
We are excited by the stone—the shard from Hadrian’s Wall—that we carry away in our pocket. As though we need physical proof that something happened. Otherwise, history told in the past tense may seem like a tall tale told in the past tense also, just as the tall tale told in the past tense pretends to be true, fact, history. For “true” history, we have the stories of historians, many accounts slightly different, maybe and maybe not true. Then we have what we are told are stones from Hadrian’s wall. We are excited, even if we never cared about Hadrian or his wall. We are excited that many different things happened on this same spot of ground, layers of stories overlapping and covering the many spots of the one earth. As though, again, the past were a space that we could go back into. The past another space, one to enter to get away from this present.
A person stands before the rubble of Hadrian’s Wall imagining what occurred and unfolded when the wall still stood, and imagining what has occurred since. For that person, the air is thick with forms, colors. But to the person standing five feet behind the one imagining, to the person who does not know that these stones have any historical significance, the air is clear, the stones are only stones. All that activity is in the force of the imagining of the person five feet in front of him.
I do not know where Hadrian’s Wall is, or if it still exists in any form. It is just a name that springs into my mind. I cannot even remember who Hadrian was, exactly.
* * *
The stones, the grammar book, the official document, the personal letter, the voice of a person who had been “lost” (“lost” as in the alumnae magazine listings of “lost” alumnae, as for instance the early friend Mary): when we bring them in front of us, they suddenly have a present presence—they belong to the present, have a life in the present alongside their life in the past. Is that why we want to find them? To give them a life in the present in order to make their life in the past more real?
* * *
Sometimes, I can’t bear it that someone like Mlle Roser isn’t still here—and this force of desire is what brings her back into the present in some other way, as: her life story written now, in the present, as I would like to write it; or as: a strong imagining that she still has consciousness in some form (with a willful disregard on my part of actual fact or possibility). The not being able to bear it is the missing. You want everything you want to be present all the time, or at least present whenever you will it to be present. What do we do about all these missing pieces?
Who is that woman talking to, who sits by her husband’s grave and talks to him? She is not “pretending” to talk to him. She is “really” talking to him. She is really talking to someone who is not there, or does not seem to anyone but her to be there. Because of the force of her imagining.
* * *
In the brain cells, the old reality coexists with the new reality (the old reality being the training of memory, what memory, consistent over a long time, has trained into those brain cells). For example, the new reality is this feeble old man who doesn’t know where his mouth is when he puts up his hand to eat, but the old reality is still there in this old woman’s brain cells, so that in times of stress, exhaustion, and confusion (having fallen in the dark in the middle of the night on her way to the bathroom, sick to her stomach) she calls out: “Robert! Robert!” as though he would come help her from his bed in the next room, as though he were not half a mile away in the nursing home. And the old reality probably continues to be there, engraved on brain cells that do not die, but are simply now accessible by routes different from the ones we use in waking, commonsensical life, accessible by routes that become smooth and easy in sleep, exhaustion, panic, when we are less “in control.” And so, our childishness, at times of emotional stress, may be simply the brain bypassing the more adult, controlled, later-learned behavior, opening pathways to earlier reactions that are still engraved in us, not erased.
I see that I speculate, but do not want to go and read. I do not want to go and find out how the brain “really” works, according to someone who “knows.” Maybe I don’t want to admit that someone else may know more about my brain than I do.
Oh, yes, though. I do believe everything has to be physical, all our emotions, even our “spiritual” life. What else can it be but physical?
* * *
Those vast apartments of the dreams—whatever they may symbolize, exactly (their symbolic character being just as “real” as their nonsymbolic character), whether it is in fact the mind, in which case the mind dreams of the mind, or something else—may be so often dreamed that now they are present in waking life, too, their presence felt constantly. Another place (like the past) to go to in the imagination: cease to see what is in front of us, bulletin board or window filled with traffic, and now see that apartment, spacious as we always desired so greatly but never had, or pasture with cow path leading up to Alpine higher pasture that feels essential to us, though exactly why? In what way essential?
* * *
This woman reports to me what I had reported to her once, many years ago, and then forgotten: that in the south of France, men who worked all day in the lavender fields would gather in the evenings in the bars, smelling of lavender. This was “my” piece of information, but I forgot it, and she remembered it all these years. After she t
ells it to me now, I seem to remember it; it seems familiar. Had it been engraved in my mind also, but in a place where I did not have any access to it until now? Am I recalling it now, or learning it afresh? How can I tell?
* * *
In the pharmacy, family-owned, with a good, steady stream of customers, several of whom are now waiting by the counter holding a prescription or some items they are about to purchase, an old Englishman in a zippered, cream-colored cardigan with remarkably frayed elbows, a scarf at the neck (perhaps an ascot), long silky white hair, an ear plug (or hearing aid), thick glasses, etc., stands at the counter writing a check in a large ledger, and over and over again he looks up and straightens up to reminisce to the pharmacist about his service in South Africa piloting a plane during the war. His daughter or granddaughter, behind him and to one side, holding his “stick,” smiles. “He’s ninety-two,” she says eventually, quietly. “He remembers everything.” She radiates generosity and unambivalent love. She does not try to hurry him along, even gently; she is not worried that he keeps some customers waiting by the counter.
Maybe what she said was “He does not forget anything.”
I want to remember exactly what she said, but someone reading this does not mind if it is not exact: Please, says that someone, just choose one or the other and get on with the story. Give me fiction, if you have to—the approximation. Not the truth, along with your doubt.
* * *
You have no separable memory of having learned that word, but you understand that word or at least have a better sense of it than you could if you hadn’t learned it at some point.
* * *
You pass a house in a strange town and it gives you a peculiar feeling—you know that something about it touches some memory, and although you don’t have access to the memory, the feeling comes to you, sometimes lightly, sometimes heavily. Houses in your own town, too familiar to you, may not trigger this same feeling because they are not fresh: the fresh house belongs to a certain type of house that triggers this feeling, but it is a fresh example because it has a color, setting, ornamentation, light, etc., that you have not seen before.
And then: What about houses or other objects that do not explicitly call up a feeling? Can it be that just under the surface, a memory and a feeling are touched and influence your mood in a way beyond your grasp?
What about the “stimulating” effect of travel? Does travel provide not only a succession of new images and thoughts but also a stream of fresh reawakenings of liminal or subliminal memories and feelings?
* * *
You see a paper case of sewing and mending needles, arranged in a neat pattern by the manufacturer—it could be anywhere, in a store, in your own sewing basket—and every time you see this, it gives you a peculiar feeling. What is it about those needles? What happened, all those many years ago? You think it must have been in that sunny back bedroom upstairs where the old sewing machine was, with its wooden case, and where you think sewing and mending went on. But did something happen, or was it just that you, a child, were suddenly struck by the beauty of those arranged needles?
* * *
The various stimuli of a given day produce dreams that are either remembered or not remembered. If not remembered, then they are a part of our life in which we were actors but are unaware of our actions, the “lost night” being like the “lost weekend,” night after night “lost.”
* * *
But if you have nurtured, deep in your mind, an equivalency between house and mind or head, eyes and windows, when you look at house after house are you always, on another level, on a less accessible level, seeing mind after mind, or head after head, eyes all around, on either side of the street?
* * *
The mind’s inevitable habit of making metaphors: in Chinese calligraphy, tiger + pig = wild boar. When we come upon an unfamiliar thing, we compare it to something familiar (book reviewers also do this).
And possibly all elements of landscape affect us all the time metaphorically as well as really: he wants to live by water not only because of its real beauties—space, light, reflection, color, constant change and motion—but also its positive metaphorical properties, whatever they may be to him—cradling, nurturing, supporting?—whereas she is afraid of living by water, despite its real beauties, because of its negative metaphorical associations for her—submersion, suffocation, the fact of being overwhelmed by a vastly greater presence than herself. She is more comfortable in a high place: a slight rise or prominence is good, a good place to put a house, for instance; but a mountaintop, even Alpine, is what she craves to experience at least periodically, not just for its real beneficial properties—fine view, spaciousness, good muscular ache in the legs getting up there, good cleansing of the lungs—but also for its metaphorical properties—being “on top of” things, not letting things “get her down,” having a “broad outlook,” and a “sense of perspective.” She cringes from cramped valleys, narrow declivities, and craves the security of a high place, especially one bare of trees, open, preferably with meadows—and a cow or two, or a few goats would not be unwelcome, the meadows being tamed or domesticated by the presence of assenting cows or goats (judgments made by animals being reassuring, even if often made in ignorance of facts beyond their comprehension).
But is the craving for the Alpine meadow also conditioned or developed by early experiences that laid down a deposit of memories that in turn continue to affect development? (Though this is perhaps beside the point, experiences of sheer beauty may train a child to a certain appreciation of beauty.)
The child is taken to a mountain. Because there is already something in the child that craves a high place (up and well away from a submersive presence), this experience of the mountain is doubly moving and satisfying to the child. Then, the memory of that doubly satisfying experience of the mountain is added to the need that has always been present for what the mountain offers metaphorically, reinforcing the compelling pull of the mountain.
Do chronic mountain climbers always resume this quest for what the mountain offers really and metaphorically? As certain writers always write the same stories, or the same poems? As though certain things can be visited over and over but never quite said in such a way that they are over and done with? The mountain has been climbed, but it is still there.
Another possibility concerning what it means to climb a mountain: When so many difficulties in our lives seem mountainous, it is satisfying to climb an actual mountain. Unlike a difficulty, the mountain is not only like a mountain, it is a mountain; and it is also easier to climb, or at least simpler.
* * *
The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (though the translation could be improved, so that it would not seem so strange and difficult in places), and Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (though it does not go far enough or have enough in it).
* * *
Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor: Reading this for me is a retreat into a depiction of an earlier reality—England in the 1960s in this case, but a very old-fashioned corner of it. And it is comforting because it is earlier, it is England, it was once real, England and English life were once reassuring to me. And if you grant that earlier (“past”) realities have the same power as present ones, you feel you can choose to be elsewhere for a time and you will feel safe from this possibly destructive present.
Curiously, when I actually lived in England in the 1960s, I was not in the least comforted or reassured. If, however, living there then, I had read a novel about England in the 1920s, I probably would have been comforted and reassured.
* * *
If stress, or an excess or deficiency of certain chemicals, changes the pathways in your brain, and you believe in the past reality and not the present one, or believe in your own created version of the present one, you really will be safe from this possibly destructive present, since this present is pervasively destructive not so much physically—though it is destructive to much and t
o many physically—as psychically, to humans anyway.
* * *
I turn on the television in the middle of a difficult day, for distraction, and happen to encounter again the movie made from Forster’s novel, and I watch it for a few minutes, and soon, though in a setting different from the one I had remembered, the words are spoken that I had been so surprised and glad to hear because I had been thinking the same thing, though they are not quite the words I had remembered. They are (preserved correctly because this time I wrote them down immediately):
It’s difficult, as we get older, not to believe that the dead live again.
What I had remembered, though still a double negative, was a slightly more positive double negative than what was actually said. In memory, I had altered the statement in a couple of ways to bring it closer to what I myself preferred to think: “As we grow older, we can’t help but believe that the dead, in some way, live on.”
