June 28, 2006

You May As Well Stay Here, Right Now

MEMORY

You can’t actually remember anything, he said.

Apropos of nothing, not even of the still air or the drooping leaves above the slatted table, rickety in the uneven gravel underfoot.

Try it. What do you think is vivid for you?

The tennis games, with a friend. Years ago. My knees creak now, there isn’t much flexibility in my back, I don’t flow as I once did. So I don’t play. But then we did. I looked forward to it even when I didn’t.

Try to remember a point.

Okay. I serve…

What did you do? Describe all of it.

I toss the ball with my left hand…

Can you see your hand?

Well, now I can…

But not a moment ago. You were going to rush by that, the way you would see your upturned palm. You saw it then, when you hit the serve, but now, as you describe it, you weren’t going to say anything.

Well, how much time do you want me to take to describe one serve?

Then don’t describe it. See it in your mind and make it happen at the same speed as the serve really happened.

He took a drink from his tall glass of mineral water and put it back on the slatted table. The paint-scaling top of the white table. The table wobbled a little, and parabolic waves washed to the lip of the glass.

I’m doing that.

Who else is in the picture?

Well, I see my friend across the net…

There must have been other people at the court. Who are they, what do they look like, what are they doing?

I don’t know.

Does the serve go in?

I don’t know.

Is it returned? What does it sound like? Where are the clouds in the sky that day? Where precisely on the blue concavity are they located, and do they move as you do after you serve? What do the people do that must have been there?

I can’t see any of that.

You must have seen it at the time.

Probably. Maybe peripherally.

Much that is central is also missing.

True.

Making love. There must have been transcendent moments.

Yes. Of course.

Try to remember one such moment, and follow it with your mind keeping all perceptions in view as you follow it, her eyes, did they grow bigger?, the color of the walls in the room, the pattern of folds in the sheet, the feel of entry, the warmth of skin, the play of light through the window. How much can you see?

I can only see one little thing at a time.

And the one thing you can see, you can’t tell from which time, can you? You’re remembering a composite experience, an idealization of many events as if they happened all at once. Did you commute to work?

I felt a great weariness as I said yes.

Try to remember how you went to work.

I took the ferry across the Bay for awhile.

How exotic. For how long?

Three years. Maybe four years, maybe five even.

He took his right index finger and brushed down the right side of his gray mustache. He smiled. Try to remember a single passage. How many times would you have crossed? Two hundred times a year, twice a day? That’s perhaps two thousand trips. That’s 1500 hours, shall we say? That seems right. That’s sixty-two and a half days of travel, two full months of nothing but riding on that ferry all day and all night. Can you remember a trip?

Parts of one or two. At the beginning. I usually worked a crossword.

Try to think of a word. Try to remember one intersection of words in one puzzle.

Nothing comes to me.

How did you get to high school?

By bus. Then by car, later.

Can you remember a single trip to school? From start to finish?

No. One day we were on a semi-circular street, in an old coupe, and we stopped to pick up this guy who had a deformed hand. I remember being first aware of that hand on the way to school, one morning. Though I’m not sure we were going to school, or why we picked him up.

I can’t remember anything completely.

No you can’t. Yet do you think you live to acquire memories?

Sometimes that seems the point of accumulating experience.

Yes. But an illusion. You haven’t acquired anything you can ever retrieve.

No, I suppose not. But still something.

Yes.

Something was there. A feeling.

Yes. That is what you are left with. A feeling. A million feelings, emotional senses, reactions, the flow of blood to the skin, the rush of anticipation. In those sketchy fragments the feelings are caught up, like dew on a spider’s web. That is what remains after the moving wave of time pushes by the moment. It is why you have been so skimpy in your description of where we are. A few remarks about scaly tables, a few leaves, a glass of water. It will all be lost anyway.

It’s inevitable.

I won’t trouble you further.

© 2003

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