rearview solstice

they said it was the shortest day not a D-Day but a December diurnal one a solstice they said something about the sun earth nexus something about the failing light flailing to find itself on the upswing stretching out the light the definition of day and now I am flailing to see that in my February-drenched rearview mirror the one with the solstice memory the one with the solstice promise winking at me the driver me the one masquerading as something someone whose name escapes me

Mother's Day Paean

Mater Jubilaei / Mother of Joyful Things

This was originally posted on Mother's Day, 2021. I happened upon it either accidentally or providentially, your pick, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-R8TefGH_4 It's a mystery to me as to who wrote the words. Is it Tosca Donati, the Italian singer and actress featured on the YouTube linked here? Is it an old hymn? After all, it's in Latin, is it not? I fake-translated the Latin words below (I can't remember how I found them) into this poem, from a memory of Latin, undictionaried, laden with a memory of my mother, who died in 2018, at 102. Happy Mother's Day, Mom. I love you. 

 

I look for one

expecting all: sure that more is to come

why expect so little

pray it to your falcon wings

tell me what you ask of me

seeking the core of better things

Mother of joy, joy

of motherhood, Mother of eternity . . . 

Eternal Mother

of all things Everlasting Motherness

circumspicio una
Omnes expectant : certe aliquis veniet
Cur exspectetis mini
dicite vos peregrini.
Quem quaeras mihi dic,
cor meliora petens.
Mater jubilaei, jubilum
matris, Mater aeternitatis...
Aeternitatis mater,
Aeternitas omnium Matrum

Route 175, 1972

I picked up the payments from Eddie Finnegan, $56 a month. My first car. A 1966 Oldsmobile Toronado. Lots of power, though I didn't know, or care, about that stuff. The kids I taught at the high school filled me in as to how many cc's or liters, or whatever it was. It was cooler than I first knew: a speedometer consisting of a rolling cylinder you viewed on the dashboard straight in front of the driver, headlights that lifted up so that they looked like mechanical, futuristic spaceship eyes. They stubbornly and frequently stuck open. Eventualy the one on the right stayed half-open, giving the appearance of a driver whose eyes were barely open or droopy. Which was true. I drove drunk countless times. Only fender benders. One night, my birthday, 90 miles per hour on Seneca Turnpike. Why? Death wish? The invincibilty of youth? Unconscionable and indefensible. How did I survive? Or those in collateral range. A big hump through the middle for the automatic transmission. No, not so much a cliche as to escape my virginity in the back seat but not for lack of trying (another cliche). Yes. Late bloomer. But it was the car I owned in the time when that rite of passage transpired. Why am I saying all this? Like some scene in a movie, her hand on my thigh, beer can between my legs, radio full blast, windows down, her honey hair sailing out the window and shrouding her face. Screaming and laughing. For a minute or two.  

Overwrite Overpass

haven't we been here before
before when
you know, back in December
westbound, not eastbound
we're eastbound now
now I remember
every rest stop
'I Shall Be Released'
over and over again a loop
remember when I said it's over before it began
right
that I'd never see her again
but we're on the other side now
son
brother
going the other way
coming and going
what's the going rate
going and coming
what's the difference
true, what's the diff
this is the other side
the opposite way
no direction home
none at all
my breath smoke in the night
rising halo
the ribbon of road unfurling in the dark
radio silent, CD off
I shall be released
arriving before I get there
but this is the other side
I know, you said that
if you can't erase it
at least record over it
overwrite it
play it backwards
pay it forward
in the rearview mirror
frosted in the skeleton night
still as an anvil
before it lands
I told you so
you didn't want to hear it
I brushed it off
lake-effect snow
on my hair
off your coat
the windshield
wiping the window
back and forth
forth and back
swishing for the clean slate
never slated
barely sated
singsong sing
north of Sing Sing
lunch for one
tea for two
for her and for you
the check, please
let's hit the road
wake up, a little Susie
on the road
you and me
me alone
as I always knew
always will
the ghost of a chance
lost in a dream
as it was in the beginning
is now and ever shall be
world without end
love without beginning

postcard from Oslo, 1973

A faded image of Akershus Castle, in Oslo, on the front. On the back, the part where people write their messages, my name appears, with a Salt Springs Road address below it. I last lived there in 1974. There are no discernible address forwardings to my current address (same city, opposite side of town), except for one Band-Aid-sized sticker with today's address affixed haphazardly and partially over the old address.

In rounded, florid cursive handwriting, likely from a fountain pen, the following message appears, in English, with several smudges and blurred letters:

"16 October 1973

Dear Paul,

Stop calling here, you drunken fool.

Love,

Marit"

I have never been to Oslo.

But I do know without a doubt who the sender is.

I met Marit in Salzburg, Austria, in July 1973. Or did I meet her on the train? I can't remember for sure. (Where is that journal I kept?) If the latter were true (the train version), how is it that I would reconnect with her in Salzburg and spend a companionable, and electrically charged, three or four days with her? Remember, we had no cellphones.

She insouciantly walked barefoot through the cathedral, sandals in one hand. I thought it was rude and scandalous of her -- which attracted me all the more.

We spent a languid and carnal afternoon in her rented room.

When I returned to the States, we exchanged letters. Her English was impeccable, better than that of the high school students I was teaching in America. She lived in Oslo. I tried to teach myself Norwegian. I read "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun, in English.

When I was drunk, which was often, I'd get the obsessive notion of calling her, when it was 5 or 6 a.m. in the morning where she was. I would anger her landlord by waking him, and her.... until one too many times and I finally stopped. Long-distance was so expensive, I easily could have flown to Norway instead. And what was it I had to say to her?

I was awful.

I must've thought I was in love with Marit, which was no excuse for such outrageous and revolting behavior. 

Is love ever a good excuse, for anything?

How did I get this postcard?

And what do I do now?

Prayer for a Palimpsest

O Goddess-God-Supreme Being-Cosmic Energy-Eternal Now-Silence:

Grant me, if it be your will, the selective amnesia of serenity, a magic slate of erased pain, a scraping away of the ragged scars of burnt memory from the parchment of remembrance. Vouchsafe to grant your servant a palimpsest of the mind, an electroconvulsive therapy (formerly known as electroshock therapy) without the electricity, if you don't mind. May it please you to wipe my slate clean, revealing a fresh layer in this palimpsest brain, enabling me motion: to reverse course, look away, move forward. While you're at it, gift me, please, with ablution and absolution, permitting a fresh and clean restart, a do-over. Ah, but you caution me against this? You tell me that every moment affords an opportunity for me myself to do this very thing. You remind me that the memory of pain can be a useful motivator, a shield against desolate repetition. In fact, you warn me of the mortal dangers of such palimpsestic thinking and feeling (and after all, is there a difference between the two?). So now I am confused. I am baffled. Puzzled and stumped. I see where oblivion has taken me, its tides tossing me wayward. Yet the burden of memory (no, pardon me; I didn't say guilt) is an anchor tied to my ankle. You decide. Yes, you decide in all your Silent Wisdom. You decide what to grant. But let me know when you have an answer. And give me the strength to abide by its commands. Amen.   

wait let me think

I look at the face. I can't remember the name that goes with it. This is frustrating. Annoying. I study the face. Try harder. No luck. It happens more and more. Old age. Or worse. Or it happens to everybody now and then. But I know that I know the name. To rewind, I know that I know the face, from somewhere. Not just the name. At one time the name was married to the face in my consciousness. So this is not a case of prosopagnosia, which I blogged about years ago. That's when you can't recognize a familiar face, often because of brain damage. This isn't that. I'll call this nomenprosopagnosia. That's a half-witted attempt to coin a useful word for this, based solely on my knowledge of nomen, the Latin word for name. See, four years of Latin is paying off. One of the reasons this annoys me is social. I do not want the embarrassment of asking someone their name if I clearly should know it. Save me from the possibility it's someone I know extremely well, say, a relative. I understand this can happen in high-stress situations, especially at introduction time. That's normal. The fear of that very forgetfulness happening heightens the pressure and the stress -- and the likelihood of a socially fatal error. Spread the net wider and you have a name-pool of friends and colleagues or former friends and former colleagues (some intimate) stretching all the way to mere acquaintances. I am willing to bet that this last category, mere acquaintance, is the most common breeding ground for this nomenloss, this nomenfright. Call it nomenamnesia. A memory trick often works for me. It's alphabetical. A. No, it's not Andrew or Amanda. B. Nope. Not Beth or Bob or Brenda or Billy. etc. Do the same with C, D, et cetera. You might get lucky early in the game. You might say to yourself, "E. Emily! Yes, that's it!" Why does that work? Or how? Do neuroscientists know? Sometimes, though, that little trick doesn't work, not even after you've gone through the alphabet, perhaps twice. And then you're back to Square One. No-Nomenland.

recalling the future

 ... and as I watched, with the stark lucidity of a future recollection (you know -- trying to see things as you will remember having seen them). 
Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

In the bleachers during the World Series, October 2012, San Francisco. I will remember this. I will remember it like this, as starkly and irretrievably happy, as I am in this film being filmed right now. The smell of beer on the metal floor. Moody clouds as the sun set. The fans in front, back, and sides of me. The frenzy. The crack of the bat. Roars of the crowd. My coffee. The manic shouting (by me). My weeping as the Tony Bennett recording played. Texting back home. All of it. Framed. Sealed. Under glass.

Are such recollections a forced inevitability? Can you will this tape into memory edited in the way you prescribe? Or does that make it a foregone conclusion a self-fulfilling prophecy?

And was it really like that? There is no way to prove or disprove it, the subjective parts. Maybe by hypnosis. 

I would suggest we do this with Big Events: birth, death, marriage, hiring, firing, divorce, travel.

But now I'm confused.

It's never as you imagine you will remember it, not exactly. Yet sometimes it is, or seems to be. Is it like the Werner Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, whereby the observer, the very act of observing, influences the outcome, the results, of the measurement? (I just butchered the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. Never mind.)

I said we do this with Big Events.

I take it all back.

It's not so much a super-hyper-future recollection as a super-hyper-experience.

I don't even know what I'm talking about anymore. I don't even know what point I was trying to make.

Maybe you can help me out.

one sentence

Bearing grief and hope, he silently placed fragrant flowers upon the earth scorched no more, at least to the naked eye, Hiroshimaed by memory and loss.

memory

I've taken to reading Marcel Proust again. Not every day, and not for long. Why? Because Proust reminds me of the subjective skew of recollection. He said, she said, I said, they said. Two individuals can share individual cups of coffee, or view a sunset, or walk a walk. Naturally (and organically, for that matter), their recollections of the shared experience are radically different. Infinitely different. We like to think otherwise, especially when being sentimental, but memory and recollection -- and thinking, if you will -- occupy idiosyncratic spheres that do not ever correspond or overlap perfectly. When you think of it (or feel of it), that's what literature purports to do: to re-create the event, the experience, the wonder, the immediacy, the "it." But it always falls short.

I'm only sleeping...

sometimes
sleeping
less often
dreaming
even less often remembering
dreaming
clearly
not one of the 100
chosen by Marina Abramovic
in The Dream Book
to retreat
into solitude
and then
relate my dream(s)
unopened
unutterable
bound
wrapped
threaden
silken
locked

what if

What if, when my uncle 'taught' me how to swim by casting my boy's body in the deep of Long Island Sound, I did not merely panic and gulp salt water and thrash and somehow rise to the top and stagger to the shore but instead . . . drowned? How would this mishap be explained? Almost as shockingly, I suspect no one else knew the frightening agony I had just endured. Were my parents even there on shore? My brothers? Grab a towel, business as usual. And what if is the same question asked about my younger brother's 'swimming lesson' by the same uncle, in a pool, probably my aunt's. Same question. Somehow we carried on. Am I being melodramatic? Or are these two what-if scenarios replete with infinite implications? Sure could explain my fear of water. That, and my friend drowning when he was sixteen, me fourteen. And I cannot recall if my 'swimming lesson' was before or after my friend's drowning.

I can't tell you why this incident surfaced in my mind recently. It's not like I've been swimming. Boating, yes. Maybe because I'm assisting someone with a memoir or because I have worked on my own memoir. Recollections.

Anyway, glad it turned out the way it did.

you think you know though you do not

You talk to a man in the discount shoe store. Tall, handsome, a bright smile, French accent. Assistant manager. I ask him about the Cole Haan shoes I was considering. Brown. Too expensive for me, even at 40% off. About $130. You think you know something of him or his background. You know nothing, or less. Are you from Africa? No. I am from Lvov, Ukraine. But I've lived in Moscow. And Washington, D.C. And Nigeria. When he was an infant, his mother tells him, he was a novelty, an item of fascination, like a display. The people there had never seen a black child, he says. Though of course the adjective "black" in this context is so skewed as to be meaningless, isn't it? I mean, think of the hues of a baby's skin, if you've ever observed a newborn, which I have but not recently. You think you remember though you do not.

Realish the Moment

We breezily assume we know what is real.

But of course "reality" is a slippery eel, hard to grasp, hard to handle.

And Marcel Proust celebrated how subjective and deceptive our memory is.

David Sedaris says his latest "nonfiction" series of personal essays is "realish."

Great word. Realish.

"Memoir is the last place you'd expect to find the truth," he was quoted as saying in The New York Times.

Bloggers, take note:

All you say is true; all you say is false.


All you write is false; all you write is true.

Last Train to Nowhere

The alchemy of longing, melancholy, romance, sadness, and hope (knowing what we know now). Berlin. Late 1980s.

Hello, I Must Be Going

Ain't going nowhere but here.

The title is stolen from The Incredible String Band, or "The Stringies," as some of us called them, back in the day, the "day" being 1967, the year that The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album came out. That year, people in the U.K. selected 5000 Spirits or The Layers of the Onion by The Incredible String Band as album of the year, if memory serves me well (and, really, does memory ever serve any of us faithfully, Monsieur Proust?). The weekend of Woodstock I saw ISB at a folk festival in NYC, along with Odetta, Tim Hardin, and others.

Hello. Goodbye.

Surrender to Win.

Lose to Gain.

"Come in we're closed."

Our paradoxes are our epiphanies, if we but see the signs before us.

The sign above was seen in a doorway of a closed bookstore, last Sunday, in Geneseo, New York, just after our trip to Letchworth State Park, "Grand Canyon of the East."

The Virtue of Jet Lag

Jet lag. What a wonderfully oxymoronic term, connoting (or is that denoting?) the rush that slows; the propulsion that regresses. Yesterday, rather hung over from fatigue (late-night browsing in the Double U Double U Double U Universe will do that), I was driving to my haircut place (i.e., Hirsute Psychotherapy by Don), and I experienced memories of recent trips. And the memories were of first moments of arrival in Ireland and in Berlin.

The gauzy, slow-motion sleepwalking of arrival in Shannon, the terror of trying to drive a car on the "wrong" side of the road, the traipsing through a cemetery in Ennistymon as the sun was rising (and Youngest One was toppling over with sleep in the back sleep).

Or sitting in a Mercedes-Benz taxi en route from Tegel Airport, trying to converse with a driver who knew not Word One of what I was saying, canals and rivers, graffiti splattered on stately buildings, falling asleep during a ballet class's lullaby piano melodies, the Brandenburg Gate looming at the end of Unter-den-Linden.

Powerful memories.

And it dawned on me (though not the dawn of vertiginous arrival). These jet-lagged memories recur frequently. They are triggers of further evocations. They are the madeleines featured by Marcel Proust, those tea biscuits that a bite of which [grammar check, please!] transported the narrator into a journey of the past.

I have come to understand that (despite the bone-crushing weariness, deep disorientation, and grouchiness) jet lag is the portal into a new world (it seems to hit me more en route from America to Europe, probably because of the morning arrival). It's really not all that bad, looking back. It's more like we are expected to bemoan it (and I understand why; I do not sleep well at all on planes), but if we roll with it, jet lag yields later benefits (sure, sure, you're saying; so does a colonoscopy).

I salute Jet Lag Memories.

Memories Are Made of This

I know, I know, you were expecting my regular-octane juvenile humor: "Mammaries are made of this HAHAhahaha."

As for dissecting memories, it's been a recurring theme, not dream, of The Laughorist blog (soon to celebrate its first blogiversary). As surely Marcel Proust illustrated lushly to the extreme, our memories are tricky, subjective, and flirtatious; we rarely know what doors they will open. And we don't know if we dare believe what we see, hear, taste, smell, or feel when we walk through those memory doors. That was part of the thesis of Stumbling on Happiness: the human propensity to color, or discolor, past (or future) events.

I just read an interesting take on this sort of thing by Alec Wilkinson, in The New Yorker issue of May 28, 2007 (do we really not write "19" anymore? does anyone remember writing 19XX [well, not really the X's] on checks, essays, reports, summonses, divorce decrees, baptismal certificates, marriage licenses, postcards, and letters of resignation? I do).

The article is about one Gordon Bell, who is lifelogging. He is creating a personal archive, a database of everything he can scan into a computer about his current and past life. MyLifeBits is what the project's called. He now works for Microsoft and wears a special camera as part of this all-consuming venture and experiment (experiventure, call it).

We bloggers think we're obsessive?

Think again.

It's all rather intriguing. Bell, 72, one of the founders of the Internet who has been called the Frank Lloyd Wright of computers, and Microsoft want to see how computers act when they establish a responsive relationship with our memories, or what we digitally tell a computer is our memories. Thus, a computer could easily say, "Watch out, Pawlie, you are entering the trough you typically enter after 17.268954 days. And it will last 3.000012223 days."

Or so I gather.

There's all sorts of potential ramifications to this sort of thing, some wonderful, some frightful. Microsoft's Jim Gemmell says in the article, "People argue about the need to forget things, but if you look at business discipline -- advising that you write everything down, your goals and objectives, and return to them to see how you did, examining what went wrong -- I think the same thing could happen with our personal lives. Being able to say, 'Now I realize my tone of voice was threatening' -- I think there's a real positive aspect in having the real record of what things looked and sounded like, and sequences of events, because we often end up believing things that are not based on facts anymore."

Really, Jim? Great. That's all I need. Computer as Grand Inquisitor. Computer as Torquemada.

Leave it to a software engineer to quantify memory.

Imagine this after-the-so-called fact bedroom debriefing: a blow-by-blow analysis on the fruitfulness (or dearth of ripe yield) in the garden of earthly pleasures, id est, orgasm or its lack. Let's cal this the Sixth Circle of Hell. And the Seventh Circle of Hell would go beyond anyone's worst nightmare of "he said, she said." It would be a recording with painful precision not only of the words but also the feelings and motives of the players.

We don't even what to imagine applying this beyond the home to the workplace or the public arena.

O spare us, HAL 9000.

This digitalization of memory gives new meaning to that line by James Joyce, "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

Maybe it's me. Maybe I'd rather take refuge in the facts as I remember them, filtered by my psyche, not HAL's.

(Wouldn't you?)

(Say, what would Steve Jobs and Apple say to all this?)

Is it all agonizingly Orwellian? Or enticingly Proustian?

Wilkinson, a fine writer (I once read an essay he wrote about the legendary New Yorker editor William Maxwell, whom I met, briefly, in the 1980s, wherein Maxwell told the young Wilkinson to send a manuscript by means of letters to Maxwell; brilliant), writes: "Memory revises itself endlessly. We remember a vivid person, a remark, a sight that was unexpected, an occasion on which we felt something profoundly. The rest falls away. We become more exalted in our memories than we actually were, or less so. The interior stories we tell about ourselves rarely agree with the truth."

Whatever that is.

May you remember This.

Boozerangs and Other Hangovers

Boozerang, n. The boomeranglike negative effects of alcohol consumption.

Of course, that's what a hangover is, isn't it? A fatal-feeling slice back into the orbital lobe of one's consciousness:
what did I do, what did I say? whom did I offend? Except that the boozerang's path sometimes sweeps far and wide, swirling into the paths of other memories, other psyches, other souls. There's no known quick cure for this. Time, wishful thinking, and the hope that one's boozerang-flooded memory errs -- those are some of the healing ingredients. And add a dash of resolve that this will never happen again.

Maybe it's a cheap shot to launch such a headache-inducing post on the day after St. Patrick's Day, so let's cast a much wider net:

No doubt, there are other hangovers besides my newly coined boozerang. We all tend to contend with these on The Day After The Day Before:

• the hangover of sober memory (did I really do that? how could I have said that?)

• the regret of squandered opportunity (if I only had spent my time and energy doing...)

• the fatalism of loss (I didn't then, so I can't ever)

• the corrosion of resentment (the parenthetical, if not hypothetical, prison of past poison)

• the return to one's senses (I thought it was so great, now I'm not so sure...)

And the cure for all these?


Exalt in the day;

surrender to the moment, awash in gratitude,

celebrating the is-ness of it all,

sung with the cardinal and the finch,

the silent cat and the snoozing dog,

the meandering cloud and lazy sun,

the melting ice and budding branch.


(The term "boozerang" and its definition, © copyright 2007 by The Laughorist.)

H a i k u

wind-swirled snow crystals
landing on naked branches
unvirginned hardscape

these gloved hands wonder
where August's sweat is hiding --
until they find skin

carnal petals sleep

the white dream of memory

pulsing but empty

a harbor of pearls
beckons the lunar nightscape
cumulus shrouded