The Write Thing

Yesterday, I woke up in the small hours of the morning and was unable to fall back into sleep. Maybe it was the excitement of a busy weekend, in which I ran (or briskly walked my way through) my first 5K race and I almost blew a car tire when I added pressure to it — can anybody explain to me why in America, a country where even orgasms are digital, there is not a single tire pressure monitor with a regular display? Even Third-World Argentina has one, for God’s sakes!
Back to the exciting weekend. Well after my near-death experience, I had an appointment with two extremes of Superbowl celebration. One was an invitation from a work colleague, who is married to Jack, an artist here in Houston, and the other was a party with the office boys (age range: mid-twenties to late fifties) at a local bar, drinking beer and rooting for the Cardinals, the team that ended up losing an incredible game that I only understood 10% of.
So I arrive at 4.45 pm at the first party, which took place in another couple’s house, a fabulous and spacious two-story construction designed in a state-of-the-art fashion by the husband, a famous architect in town. The house is part of the art tour of the Heights, the hip and bohemian area of this city that would surprise the most skeptical visitors. I take my own little tour of the house, guided by my friend and one of the guests, the wondrous Loretta, a Croatian concert pianist that had drunk too many “fogs” — the infamous mysterious drink the party is named after. As an aside, after the tour, Loretta and I will agree that the closet in the main bedroom deserves a tour of its own — how can anyone be so tidy? Probably it’s an architect thing…

The party unfolds and I am introduced to most of the patrons of the arts in Houston, Museum directors, Film festival organizers, and the like. At one point, 62-year-old Botoxed Mary asks me what is my artistic specialty, and I start my speech on working for an oil and gas consulting firm. I can tell she is appalled and I only then realize that I should have lied…but she is too drunk to even get worried about my secular status, and I can always interject and say I used to be an amateur opera singer. That seems to relieve her while she looks at my neck and tells me I look so good for my age, as if I were in my mid-seventies. It dawns on me just then how much age matters in some circles…the reality of it becomes a burden and many feel compelled to find some surgical solution to the woe of growing old. At least Mary does look awesome at 62, although I personally think that has more to do with her post-menopause sexual drive than with the benefits of lifting and laser procedures — after all, she quite promptly tells me her man is nine years younger and that they go at it for hours.

In the sitting room we meet John, relaxing on the huge circular couch and sipping something as he quietly watches the game. When my friend asks him where he knows the host and hostess from, he simply says he saw there was a party going on, and he thought he might join in. I still think he was telling us the truth…Anyway, we are now halftime through the game. Now women want to pump up the volume and listen to the commercials and Bruce Springsteen is about to give a mini-performance. Venus and Mars, boys and girls, is a combination that never fails. Boys watch the game, women watch the commercials, but they all watch the Boss.

Taking my cue from the halftime call, I focus on keeping a ying-yang synchrony in my own reading of America’s biggest night event after Thanksgiving, and I leave for the Big Woodrow’s in Chimney Rock and Richmond Avenue, where my boys are hanging out. They are at a table outside, enjoying the weather in a mild Sunday evening and watching the LCD screens give a partial victory to the Steelers. As I arrive, the Steelers’ luck will change, and the Cardinals’ touchdown just a minute before the end of the game will light my workmates’ eyes with a glimmer of hope. A brief moment of joy. Only seconds later, the ghost of a tight victory vanishes before their eyes, as a yellow-clad boy holds the ball inside the court in a fantastic acrobatic move worthy of a ballet performance. The game is now irreversibly lost for the Cardinals, and hope gives way to a little frustration, although nobody is passionate enough in my eclectic group to get into a heated after-match argument — which I am secretly grateful for.

We all get into our cars and drive home. The night is over early in America, and I am in bed by 10.30…only to wake up a few hours later and amuse myself with the memory of a weekend to remember.

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.

France: – The long walks along the Seine in chilly autumn nights, crossing the Pont des Arts to the Cour du Louvre, starting small in the esthetically harmonious lights that wet the walker’s appetite, only to enter the Grand Cour and lose my senses in synesthetic ecstasy before the pyramidal shape and the tones of light and shadow it casts on the quiet pool.

- The 67 bus to Pigalle, a metaphor to classical Paris, a place that would be so distant and so close to me as a student, walking down rue Lepic to her place, where a funny picture of a Michael Jackson-like friend or relative would preside over the table across which she would supervise the words to my thesis, as I got irreversibly lost in her perfume and stood only half an inch away from drowning in the nape of her neck.

- The day we knew it was meant to be, shortly after I pleaded to her to discontinue the use of French between us and caress my ears with her Sicilian accent, orgasmic in its essence and fugitive in its state, with her destined to be so far away from me, and love sentenced not to be. Est-ce que je t’ai gênée? I let her hand touch mine in simple complicity, knowing I had been the one to kiss her the night before.

- A picnic in spring, a good, cheap Côte du Rhône from Franprix to counterbalance the chilly breeze, a mix of pungent, hard and soft fromages of the best possible cru for the standard student pocket, and the hope that the moon would continue to shed its light on us, inexperienced souls convinced that Paris was a woman. Great futures awaiting and, behind the sharp angle of L’Ile Saint Louis, the distant foreboding of goodbye.

- The ride in Line 13 to Saint-Denis, the courses on Austen and the Brontes, Woolf and I, alone, as I returned to the small room at the Maison de l’INA, warmed dinner and plunged into other readings, battling against Orlando Furioso from an unkempt English translation, burying my nose in the secrets of Knole, and letting Sackville speak from her poems and her letters of her complicity with the genius at Tavistock Square.