:: anne in the attic ::

Create Your Own Countdown

:: Friday, May 28, 2004 ::

Some post-"Pilgrimage to California" road trip musings:

Thirty-year-old memories, like the bubbles in blown glass, are distorted, permanent, deeply embedded, hand-hewn. The human element had its effect long ago, and now time slowly erodes them until the dust can be simply blown away.

I think of the short story by Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes the Memorious," in which the main character suffers a perfect memory for every detail of his existence, his experience. At one point, he expresses a difficulty in having the same name for "a dog at three-fourteen (seen in profile)" as for "[the same dog] at three-fifteen (seen from the front)." On some level, I would have to agree on the propriety of incorporating both time and perspective into our nomenclature, specific as we already believe it to be.

How else could I explain that the house at Robert Court, seen from all sides in 1969 at the four-year-old height and comprehension, is not the same as the house seen from the front in 2004 at the thirty-eight-year-old height and comprehension? Yet it is the same house. In the same place. And parts of the old memories fall together easily, some of them normal, heartening, others eerie and somewhat alien.

Perhaps now, as an adult, I wonder what my life really was like back then. I'd like to go back and take a closer look-- not to affect or to change circumstances, but just to observe them, to know them better. What am I forgetting? Have I lost something integral? I want to know. It's kind of why I went back. Guess I didn't quite know that when I left here.

Not knowing the alternatives, I think that I am grateful things went the way they did: it's the only way I could end up here... now. Perhaps that's a bit fatalistic, but with the twist of choice, of the possibilities of many paths which always lay before us in the potential. In a way, Kirk's life ended early so that mine became as it is today. I would thank him for the choice to have a child enter his life, if only briefly, and for sowing the seeds for my life in just the way that he must have. And, when I finally made it back thirty-five years later, for showing up on cue.

:: Anne 9:35 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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There isn't even enough time within a day to describe how much I am required to do these days. And just how taxing it has been with no time for my spirit to run free. All of my time is spoken for, my energies promised.

While I seek to escape an excess of external structure, I am delving into another kind within, as I continue the work at hand in my head (now there's an image). Before the pencil can be raised and the notes transcribed, there must be a basic construct. Primarily, there's the arrangement of another artist's song at which I want to try my hand. But always in the background, my own work clears and blurs, like I'm trying to read sheet music lying at the bottom of a busy swimming pool while standing at the surface.

I have a vision of standing near the edge of fantastic green cliffs overlooking the wild ocean, not a structure in sight, the life around me sounding itself, Whitman's "barbaric yawp." Soon. I will go there, go where. I am nearly suffocating here in civilization.

"'Nature' is what we call the world around us when we sense that it is alive." -"Nature" on PBS

:: Anne 10:52 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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I think I understand now why Jay Gatsby threw those parties. Not so much to encourage people he didn't know to like him, but rather to create a situation where he enjoyed himself, drifting between the different mini-cultures that cohere within gatherings. It was about experience. Yes, boredom, but I think he had more going on inside than most realized besides the desire for Daisy.

What brought this on? Perhaps my own desire to spend time with others in various experiences. There are, of course, certain things that I will do alone, want to do alone, such as this upcoming trip to California. But I seek a balance between my need for solitary pursuits and my want to share good company and life experiences: a balance so delicately wrought, it seems. It's not easy to find those superlative horses, as the parable goes, and life is too brief and too dear to spend it with those who do not mesh with a person's values, ideals. I think it was Emerson who said that the first criteria of high friendship is the ability to do without it. I love that-- and I translate it to mean an impermeable autonomy, a sense of self that is strong enough not to be compromised by any relationship. And that is what I seek in others, along with certain politics, and perhaps a list of basic values. We all do this, I think, but more intuitively. I mean really, who else with whom to share the experiences you value most highly than ones who are likely to appreciate them as well?

:: Anne 6:29 PM [smartass remarks] ::
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