The Write Thing

Halloween. Wikipedia decorates its description with the legend of Stingy Jack. It is a night that many children may have used to offer a trick- or-treat promise on alerted neighbors ready to meet the traditional demands. It is a night for playing, even when tradition is nowhere to be found in a DNA that is carved straight from the Pampas, where everything grows to look just as plain as barren land.

It was my night for literature. A group of shining knights in armor with a literary sword decided to organize a cultural soirée, reading short stories written by one of them in candlelight. We were entertained with a good lentils broth (or stew, for that matter, I’ll never know what to call it for sure), some pot-smoking and literature. My two escorts — beautiful ladies with a coincidental birth date — looked excited to be there, and so was I, enjoying a little bit of hippie life after a Doris Day hiatus. The stories were not really good, or perhaps it is simply the fact that the whole idea of oral transmission of literature is a double-edged sword, exposing the flaws of a story that does not flow all the more bluntly. It does not matter. It made me want to write about this Halloween night, which in my French days of yore I arbitrarily baptized with the heading that crowns this posting.

Halloween is a good set of instructions to abide by in a cool spring evening. Last year, at Halloween, I was in Rome, absorbing and saying goodbye to Europe as I once knew it. Today my Jack -O- Lantern is blind, and I like to feel that it can start anew. It is a night to breathe, to fuck, to pretend that the next day means something different, to feel the smell of a strange skin in the heat of a capricious, one-night fire. A night to lie to ourselves, consciously, for there will be a morning, but we will have left her room stealthily in the small hours, long before we could remember the contours of her face, or recognize — were we ever to hear it again — the sound of her voice as she called a fictitious, ghostly name.

I have not written on this blog for quite a while. It has been a difficult month, full of retrospection and introspection, with some good moments but, basically, lots of inner self questioning, if such a combination of words exists in the English language. There has been pain inside and also outside, in my “circle of trust”, and it has had a very strong impact on me. I hope eventually the whole experience will make me a more insightful human being and a better person.

So, if I had to choose poetry to illustrate the moment — I recall mentioning poetry earlier in this blog as my foie gras in a world of prosaic corned beef, or something of the sort — there should be some Emily Dickinson. Sagittarian, tortured, passionate and suffering goddess of illuminated seclusion, her writing dissects the anatomy of feelings in a methodically simple way. I would say it is the kind of poetry where each word weighs a ton, and there are so few that missing one single element in her compositions results in major loss.

I read on a website the other day that the poem I quote below was allegedly written for her sister in law, with whom the poetess was apparently infatuated. Perhaps associating lonely Dickinson (the typical Puritan spinster, at least in form) with lesbianhood is an oversimplification, but let’s agree that as we read her it is impossible not to perceive that certain component which denotes someone as being really sensitive to the female world. But no more words from me, let’s hear it from Miss Dickinson herself:

What mystery pervades a well!

The water lives so far,

Like neighbor from another world

Residing in a jar.

The grass does not appear afraid;

I often wonder he

Can stand so close and look so bold

At what is dread to me.

Related somehow they may be, –

The sedge stands next the sea,

Where he is floorless, yet of fear

No evidence gives he.

But nature is a stranger yet;

The ones that cite her most

Have never passed her haunted house,

Nor simplified her ghost.

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

It appears that the lesbian code can be cracked by replacing the word “nature” in the poem with the name of the undisclosed destinataire, Susan Gilbert. Regardless of whether it was Susan or somebody else the poem was directed to, I cannot but marvel at Dickinson’s deftness in portraying the mystery of others, the hidden self, or selves, of le grand autre. The well (the other) is a mystery, a lonely, perhaps exciting mystery. Sometimes, paradoxically, the nearer we get to it — as to nature itself — the more unfathomable it becomes.

Apoptosis is a form of programmed cell death essential to guaranteeing our existence as healthy human beings. The lack of apoptosis (death, so to speak) or its excess can trigger cancer or ischemic processes that can lead to our physical death. In short, cells must die in a programmed or orderly way so that we can go on living.

These days I have been reading a very interesting book written by an Argentine neuroscientist, Iván Izquierdo. The book is called El Arte de Olvidar and, far from being a romantic novel, it is a very well written essay that illustrates part of the enigma surrounding the human brain and, particularly, the way in which our brain constructs, fabricates and destroys memories. Forgetting or losing our memories is necessary for life. It appears that oblivion is part of the deal because life would be impossible if we were able to remember every single thing that happens to us in a normal day (think of Funes, el memorioso for example). We have what Izquierdo calls a “working memory” that enables us to perform our daily tasks and completely obliterate everything that would be considered superficial, or would obstruct such performance. Short-term and long-term memories, that is, the ones that “stay” are more capriciously retained or forgotten. It is possible that some of them are lost forever on account of the death of brain cells — apoptosis, for example, is responsible for helping us “lose” our crawling abilities as babies so that we can become bipeds — whereas other memories are simply stored somewhere else and sometimes replaced with new acquisitions (I am thinking here of our computer hard drive when we delete something; it soon fills up the space we freed with the new information we feed into it — I wonder what memories will go down the drain for me now that I have taken up Swedish lessons?).

But perhaps the most interesting section of this book is when the author speaks about the memories we fabricate. Indeed, sometimes what we remember is distorted by our own desires, frustrations and emotions into something that may have never happened — at least not as we remember it. However, we then subconsciously proceed to convince ourselves of our “new” memory, and live happily in that conviction. Why would we fabricate memories? Because of our emotionality.

Memories are emotions. What stays with us, the smells, the sounds, the tactile impressions we recall, fabricated or not, have a strong emotional component. Therefore, if a reader retains a line in a book, it is an emotional action. Years ago, when I first read Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body I was struck by the first line in that novel…Why is the measure of love loss? I only read the line once, but it stayed with me ever since, without having read the book again. My emotions at that time were possibly linked to what Winterson wrote. I remember the line today, but I could not really speak about the novel at length if you asked me.

Despite our emotional strength, sooner or later some memories fade and vanish, whether their root was emotional or not. It is part of the process. Again, a necessary fact.

At some point, everything dies. Still, we are what we remember, each of us unique in our recollections. We are made of memories, and live the present tense on those. It is here that the idea of apoptosis comes back. Our own apoptotic work with our memories is not arbitrary or fanciful. We must be extra careful not to kill the memories that enable us to keep on living or let live those that would destroy us. However, sometimes we do not succeed and we lose our own functionality. This can be as serious as Alzheimer, but it can also be a psychological limitation, such as dwelling on a past that hurts and does not serve a purpose. Therefore, it is clear that — in as much as it is possible — we must let the right memories go, so that we can keep on living in a good and healthy way.