I do not remember myself ever not reading. I do remember, though, the first books I read with an intentionality budded by sheer breath-held interest, books that I requested as birthday and Christmas presents, books that I embraced and which embraced me back, books that bridled my imagination and led it to the pasture of small-town Bayport: the Hardy Boys books. It’s true. The gesso that readied my life-long love of reading, that underlay my forty plus years of studying, teaching, and writing about books, was the intrepid sleuthing adventures of teenaged amateur detectives Frank and Joe Hardy.
What, after all, was there not for a young boy to like? Frank and Joe lived lives canopied by fast-forward action, mystery, and a shuddery, seeping atmosphere of noir. Their dad Fenton did not sell insurance or cars or hardware, did not occupy a nondescript cubicle as a nondescript drone in a nondescript office, did not farm or bake or plumb or excavate. No, he was a professional detective. He unsecreted secrets, unbaffled the baffling, clarified the recondite, explained the inexplicable, penetrated the impenetrable—and best of all, he often sought his sons’ assistance. They had girl friends and frolicked at beach parties and barbeques. They had cool friends, my favorites being roly-poly Chet with his yellow jalopy and buff Biff with his fearsome pugilistic skills always at their service. They went to school but never sat in a classroom. School made no claims on their time: they never had to study, do long division, or memorize all the states and their capitals. They never experienced the distress of bringing home a report card. They had a car, motorcycles, and a boat. They spoke Spanish. They regularly bested adult authority figures. Frank and Joe garmented the collective id of the planet’s prepubescent males with velvety wish fulfillment.
Inevitably, the Hardy Boys books have drawn the lofty disdain of critics. The rasp of literary theory and its critical pieties has zested the Hardy Boys rind. For some, the books are aesthetically moribund: lackluster prose coupled with templated plots conjoined with wholly absent character development. For others, the boys epitomize, as their name suggests, the hardness and hardiness of the militantly gendered male personality, and their stories reinforce the relations of a patriarchal social structure, a world of male struggle for success, a world in which mothers and girl friends appear in supporting roles only. For others, the stories perpetuate racial and ethnic stereotypes or inscribe social class hierarchies. For others, bent on queering the books, the girl friends and fraternal relations mask a homosocial, perhaps even a homoerotic, thematic. For still others, noting the strange ineptitude that seemingly subverts Fenton Hardy’s professional and paternal authority, the books enact a totemic dance around the figure of the vanquished father.
While these criticisms may have merit, I think they are ungenerous because they overlook the value of the books as narratives, as ordered encounters with lives not our own, lives that report experiences not our own and from which we can learn. I passed from my world, with its choices and contingencies and vicissitudes, to the Hardy boys’ world and I experienced it. I saw it, heard it, even felt it. The space between those worlds shrunk with intimacy, and if there was a line of demarcation between them, a border of some kind, I passed over it with the passport of a willing imagination. And then I returned, if not a better person, then certainly a smarter one. David Abram, philosopher and environmental ethicist, observes that the tales told in oral cultures carry “nested in their narratives much of the accumulated knowledge of the culture,” that they convey the “practical knowledge” necessary “in one’s daily actions and interactions,” and that once those narratives were written, they became unchanging and autonomous, losing their grounding in the specific contexts of situation and character that called them forth. I would assert, however, that written narratives can perform the same function Abram ascribes to oral narrative.
Reading the Hardy Boys books, I learned that sibling relations did not need to be as fraught as was my brother Dennis’s and mine. I learned that fathers and sons can share interests and confidences, and that fathers were sometimes fallible. I learned that mothers love without qualification and that spinster aunts are all bark and no bite. I learned that, despite the enshrined cultural narrative that celebrates them, small towns can harbor people with dark intentions, can be cosseted enclaves filled with jeopardy and intrigue. I learned that analytical thought required one to track and trace, decipher heralding signs, and draw conclusions. Most important, perhaps, I learned that no difference need obstruct the stimuli of words on a page and the stimuli of imagination. Those words and I became a conjoined focus, a coming together of the external me reading an arrangement of letters and internal world of the narrative. The subtle and large gestures of a character’s eye or face or body; the gradients of event; the tonal resonance of voice and mood; the depth and dimension, the cavities and densities of place—these were as carnal, as enfleshed, as I was, as alive as I was, their inhalations and exhalations as rhythmic as my own. I made my mark on those stories; they made their mark on me.
I still have those Hardy Boys books, boxed and carefully stored in the basement. I recently pulled out and reread one that I remember being a particular favorite, The House on the Cliff. I expected to be recognized, welcomed, like some prodigal son returning from a far-off country. Instead, it shunned me and sent me away. I was not stirred by the forbiddingly secret caves, was not shaken by the always lurking, drug-smuggling villains, was not pinwheeled by the slipstreaming danger that enveloped the boys seemingly in every chapter. My interest in this book, so foundational in my reading life, was a lost drachma that no amount of light, no amount of careful sweeping, could uncover. I should have known better. The boys and their adventure were carapaced in timelessness, while I had become a creature of time. I was not the same reader. I changed, and suddenly the books that had become transparent in my hands, unmediated media, grew opaque, caused a vague dissatisfaction, seemed somehow monochromatic, limited, a threshold I felt an urging to cross. The very books that had brought me to reading had spurred me to reach beyond them to a relationship with more complex texts. Exactly why, I cannot say. It’s a mystery, one worthy, perhaps, of Frank and Joe.
Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Friday, December 24, 2010
My MRI Experience
Yesterday morning I had an MRI, an experience that, were I a Calvinist, would have convinced me of that faith’s two fundamental propositions: that I had, in some way unknown to me but blindingly apparent to omniscient Providence, sinned grievously; and that no affliction is unaccompanied by the catalyzing grace needed to overcome it.
My appointment was scheduled for 6:45 a.m. Now, an MRI before breakfast, before, even, I’ve managed to shake off the burrs of sleep and insert the day’s coffee IV, strikes me as a squalid defilement of all that is human. Why so early? I live in a rural community and the nearest hospital is located in the county seat some 15 miles up the road. The county hospital does not have an MRI scanner, but a truck bearing one comes every other Tuesday, and on this particular Tuesday it was beginning its rounds at my county’s hospital. I arrived at 6:30, knowing that when I reported to the reception desk I’d be spending approximately 15 minutes answering the same questions I’ve answered on previous visits, filling out the same forms I’ve filled out on previous visits, and signing various documents confirming that I’ve been told this or shown that—all of which I’ve done on previous visits. I then took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a stray copy of Midwest Living, just to scan, for I expected to be MRIed at any moment.
At 7:15, the hospital’s lab technician asked me to follow him to the lab so he could draw some blood to test for something or other. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve been to my doctor’s office twice in the past week and both times she drew blood. And one hour after the last visit, I got a phone call from her nurse telling me they hadn’t drawn enough. So, I had more drawn just yesterday at the local clinic. I’m getting a little tired of being poked, penetrated, and tapped. I feel like a toothpicked cocktail frank in a medical buffet.” Truth be told, I’m no High Nooned Gary Cooper when it comes to needles. Perhaps I suffer from aichmophobia, the fear of sharp, pointed objects. No doubt, I am an exuberant sulker; as Voltaire observed, I take “pleasure in complaining” and “delight in viewing only evil.” But, he checked his records and, sure enough, he had the blood the test required. Next, he began reading a series of questions, all of which, I quickly saw, had to do with surgeries that would have implanted some ferric object inside me—screws, stents, pumps, and the like. After the 5th question, I said, “Look, let’s save ourselves some time. Other than a tonsillectomy when I was 3 years old, I have never had surgery of any kind.” He was, however, a man indentured to the fierce banality of a process for which he was merely a carrier, not the creator. He continued asking, dutifully checking the “no” boxes, and had me sign a form saying I’d been asked the questions. Then back to the waiting room and Midwest Living, which I now began to read.
In the middle of an article about a corporate executive who had fled his Manhattan suite for small town Iowa living and designer bird-house building, I was called for my MRI. It was 8:05. “You know,” I told the two attendants who walked me to the truck, “I was told my appointment was at 6:45, and I’m not a little pissed off that I’ve had to wait an hour and twenty minutes. Now, I know these things happen, and it’s probably not your fault, but, damn, an hour and twenty minutes!” “Oh, I’m sorry,” one of the attendants said; “it seems a miscommunication occurred between your doctor’s office and the MRI scheduler.” A “miscommunication occurred.” Such a convenient use of the passive voice; how cleverly it obscures assigning anyone fault, how sly its practiced use in hemming the ragged edge of a patient’s anger. Well, I was having none of it. I’m not an English teacher for nothing. “That may well be the case,” I said, “but, you know, I’m not in the mood to be Strother Martined.” They looked perplexed. “You know, the actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke? His tag line is, `What we got he-ah is a failure to communicate.” They hadn’t seen the movie.
The MRI itself, believe it or not, was a warm Pacific slipstream in the thin, cold current of my wintery discontent. Stretched comfortably on the table, covered in two blankets, head padded in place, the on-call bulb firmly grasped in my right hand, I was gingerly slid into the center of the machine—birth in reverse, a return to the womb. Sure, instead of the soothing beat of the maternal heart, I heard only the cacophonous clang of jackhammer staccato and the stiletto chir of dial-tone buzz, but I tried to imagine it as the atonal music of a John Cage or Arnold Shoenberg. Imagination, however, deals with the essence behind reality, and when that ear-assaulting clangor proved impossible to get behind, I resorted to a strategy I have used intermittently in the past in similar situations: a recurrent fantasy involving Salma Hayek and cellophane—a fantasy so potent that, with five minutes to go in the procedure, it got me through being slid out for yet another poking and penetrating, this one with some strange brew to “provide contrast.” Fantasy does not genuflect to the imperial demands of reality. Fantasy is dissociation from reality. I’ve always been good at dissociating.
And then, finally, I am released from the magnetic womb, rebirthed, released into a world where breakfast and a Mr. Coffee machine await. “Good job, Jerry,” one of the attendants said, “we’ve got clear images.” This, of course, was the verbal equivalent of a lollipop, my “good job” being only my capacious talent for lying still. Little did they know the role Salma played in that stillness. I did worry briefly that the images I had conjured might, somehow, leave a residue, a resonance, in those magnetically-generated images of my brain, and that, if they did, they had the potential for being WikiLeaked. That could prove embarrassing. Is the mind in the brain? Detached immaterially from it? Well, that’s a cirque du soleil of debates, best left to the experts. I shrugged it off as a kind of wrestling beneath my weight class.
It is reported that French novelist Honore de Balzac carried a cane upon which was written, “I smash all obstacles.” Upon hearing that, Franz Kafka declared his cane should read, “All obstacles smash me.” Were it not for Salma, the efflorescent Salma, the luminescent Salma, the Salma who redeemed my MRI experience with the magnetic resonance of fantasy, I would have exited that MRI scanner truck, halt and hobbled, leaning heavily on Kafka’s cane.
My appointment was scheduled for 6:45 a.m. Now, an MRI before breakfast, before, even, I’ve managed to shake off the burrs of sleep and insert the day’s coffee IV, strikes me as a squalid defilement of all that is human. Why so early? I live in a rural community and the nearest hospital is located in the county seat some 15 miles up the road. The county hospital does not have an MRI scanner, but a truck bearing one comes every other Tuesday, and on this particular Tuesday it was beginning its rounds at my county’s hospital. I arrived at 6:30, knowing that when I reported to the reception desk I’d be spending approximately 15 minutes answering the same questions I’ve answered on previous visits, filling out the same forms I’ve filled out on previous visits, and signing various documents confirming that I’ve been told this or shown that—all of which I’ve done on previous visits. I then took a seat in the waiting room and picked up a stray copy of Midwest Living, just to scan, for I expected to be MRIed at any moment.
At 7:15, the hospital’s lab technician asked me to follow him to the lab so he could draw some blood to test for something or other. “Wait a minute,” I said, “I’ve been to my doctor’s office twice in the past week and both times she drew blood. And one hour after the last visit, I got a phone call from her nurse telling me they hadn’t drawn enough. So, I had more drawn just yesterday at the local clinic. I’m getting a little tired of being poked, penetrated, and tapped. I feel like a toothpicked cocktail frank in a medical buffet.” Truth be told, I’m no High Nooned Gary Cooper when it comes to needles. Perhaps I suffer from aichmophobia, the fear of sharp, pointed objects. No doubt, I am an exuberant sulker; as Voltaire observed, I take “pleasure in complaining” and “delight in viewing only evil.” But, he checked his records and, sure enough, he had the blood the test required. Next, he began reading a series of questions, all of which, I quickly saw, had to do with surgeries that would have implanted some ferric object inside me—screws, stents, pumps, and the like. After the 5th question, I said, “Look, let’s save ourselves some time. Other than a tonsillectomy when I was 3 years old, I have never had surgery of any kind.” He was, however, a man indentured to the fierce banality of a process for which he was merely a carrier, not the creator. He continued asking, dutifully checking the “no” boxes, and had me sign a form saying I’d been asked the questions. Then back to the waiting room and Midwest Living, which I now began to read.
In the middle of an article about a corporate executive who had fled his Manhattan suite for small town Iowa living and designer bird-house building, I was called for my MRI. It was 8:05. “You know,” I told the two attendants who walked me to the truck, “I was told my appointment was at 6:45, and I’m not a little pissed off that I’ve had to wait an hour and twenty minutes. Now, I know these things happen, and it’s probably not your fault, but, damn, an hour and twenty minutes!” “Oh, I’m sorry,” one of the attendants said; “it seems a miscommunication occurred between your doctor’s office and the MRI scheduler.” A “miscommunication occurred.” Such a convenient use of the passive voice; how cleverly it obscures assigning anyone fault, how sly its practiced use in hemming the ragged edge of a patient’s anger. Well, I was having none of it. I’m not an English teacher for nothing. “That may well be the case,” I said, “but, you know, I’m not in the mood to be Strother Martined.” They looked perplexed. “You know, the actor who played the warden in Cool Hand Luke? His tag line is, `What we got he-ah is a failure to communicate.” They hadn’t seen the movie.
The MRI itself, believe it or not, was a warm Pacific slipstream in the thin, cold current of my wintery discontent. Stretched comfortably on the table, covered in two blankets, head padded in place, the on-call bulb firmly grasped in my right hand, I was gingerly slid into the center of the machine—birth in reverse, a return to the womb. Sure, instead of the soothing beat of the maternal heart, I heard only the cacophonous clang of jackhammer staccato and the stiletto chir of dial-tone buzz, but I tried to imagine it as the atonal music of a John Cage or Arnold Shoenberg. Imagination, however, deals with the essence behind reality, and when that ear-assaulting clangor proved impossible to get behind, I resorted to a strategy I have used intermittently in the past in similar situations: a recurrent fantasy involving Salma Hayek and cellophane—a fantasy so potent that, with five minutes to go in the procedure, it got me through being slid out for yet another poking and penetrating, this one with some strange brew to “provide contrast.” Fantasy does not genuflect to the imperial demands of reality. Fantasy is dissociation from reality. I’ve always been good at dissociating.
And then, finally, I am released from the magnetic womb, rebirthed, released into a world where breakfast and a Mr. Coffee machine await. “Good job, Jerry,” one of the attendants said, “we’ve got clear images.” This, of course, was the verbal equivalent of a lollipop, my “good job” being only my capacious talent for lying still. Little did they know the role Salma played in that stillness. I did worry briefly that the images I had conjured might, somehow, leave a residue, a resonance, in those magnetically-generated images of my brain, and that, if they did, they had the potential for being WikiLeaked. That could prove embarrassing. Is the mind in the brain? Detached immaterially from it? Well, that’s a cirque du soleil of debates, best left to the experts. I shrugged it off as a kind of wrestling beneath my weight class.
It is reported that French novelist Honore de Balzac carried a cane upon which was written, “I smash all obstacles.” Upon hearing that, Franz Kafka declared his cane should read, “All obstacles smash me.” Were it not for Salma, the efflorescent Salma, the luminescent Salma, the Salma who redeemed my MRI experience with the magnetic resonance of fantasy, I would have exited that MRI scanner truck, halt and hobbled, leaning heavily on Kafka’s cane.
Sunday, December 19, 2010
The Best Gifts
I am shockingly ungifted with the gift of giving gifts. A backward glance at the history of my gift-giving reveals a mosaic of singular ineptitude, a frieze of nincompoopery, arrested moments of unrivalled duncitude. If my gift-giving were a sonnet, it would have 13 lines; were it Romeo and Juliet, it would lack the Capulets; were it a raiding Angle or Saxon, it would have taken the wrong off-ramp to Britain; were it a 100 meter dash, I’d be running it in a spacesuit. The gifts I have given have been ergo sum without the cogito; they have been lime green cargo pants at a faculty tea; they have been bags bursting with botches; they have been premeditated acts with shallowness aforethought. Seeking inspiration, I have lit votive candles to the art of gift-giving, to be rewarded with only a slipstream of silence. I have milked the cow of gift-giving, only to have skim splash into the bucket. When it comes to choosing gifts, my brain shutters its cognitive shop and retires to a back room for a toddy and a nap. Like the demonic sages in Paradise Lost, I have “reason’d high” about gift-giving and found myself “in wandering mazes lost.” The Buddha describes an Eightfold Path to enlightenment, but, when it comes to gift-giving, I cannot find Path #1, and it does not register on my Garmin.
I have committed unpardonable acts of gift-giving. Were the skin of every inhabitant of this planet a manuscript upon which offenses against the art of gift-giving were inscribed, mine would, as Jonathan Edwards said describing his sinfulness, “heap infinite upon infinite.” Over the years, I have given my wife a set of Revere Ware pots and pans—well, it is cookware with a pedigree stretching back to Paul himself; a 30 pound bag of carrots—well, she does like carrots and they are brimming with Vitamin A; a Subway gift card—well, she is an on-the-go woman with a jones for the grilled chicken on asiago bread; and a massive package containing 72 rolls of toilet paper—well, it was a deal too good to pass up and proof positive that I had mastered the art of the deal. I once pilfered my best friend’s golf shoes, polished them, and gave them to him as a birthday present—a gag gift he found as amusing as a computer virus. I have given my grandkids underwear and socks—you simply cannot have too many of these items, don’t you know. I have given my mom calfskin driving gloves, only to learn that she no longer drove. I have given my dad a box of freshly picked, organically grown strawberries, forgetting, somehow, that he suffered from diverticulosis. I have given a colleague a rather nice California merlot, forgetting, somehow, that his religion proscribed “stimulating” beverages. Somehow, for some reason known only to God or Oprah or Joel Osteen, I have managed to turn the act of gift-giving into an incessantly plucked string of self-reproach. St. Francis of Assisi said that “it is in giving that we receive.” I have received a zettabyte of mortification. Emerson says “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” My portion, it would seem, is capaciously meager.
I could, for solace, turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift-giving ritual. A self-cancelling paradox, Derrida claims, lies at the heart of gifting. To give a gift is to enter a tangled exchange which incurs an obligation on the receiver’s part, a debt to be repaid, even if that repayment is no more than saying “Thank you.” A gift, to be received as a genuine gift, must disguise itself, must not appear to be a gift, must transcend the fraught cycle of giving and receiving, must locate itself beyond self-interested calculation or strategic deployment. Givers must be anonymous, Derrida concludes, even to themselves, lest they fall prey to the beguiling snare of prideful self-worth. The gift must not be a given thing, and the receivers must have no awareness that they have received a gift. In effect, a genuine gift annuls itself.
Clever, is it not? A swashbuckling concept, philosophically considered, festooned with panache, but, I suspect, of minimal value in chamfering the sharply disappointed looks of my grandkids when they found the raisins and oranges I anonymously placed once in their Christmas stockings. Like so much of postmodern theory, Derrida’s deconstructed gift is all ad hocery, without wider application and as practical as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
The best gifts are really two gifts: that which is given, and, behind it, the unsurpassed gift of attention. The best gifts mean that the receiver has, at some point, been the singular focus of the giver’s concentrated attention and purposeful planning. They mean that the receiver has been placed on the giver’s icon-laden cognitive desktop and singled out, attended to, deliberated on. The best gifts mean that the receiver has been experienced in the consciousness of the giver. They mean someone has watched the receiver wander off to a certain store aisle, linger in front of something. Someone has looked at the receiver looking. The best gifts mean that someone has listened to the receiver talk, wonder, express a frustration, reveal a desire or need or anxiety. Someone has taken in the receiver’s words; someone has made them a part of their awareness and introspection. The best gifts mean that someone has looked and listened and archived that looking and listening away, to be accessed when a gift-giving occasion arrives. The best gifts mean that in an era that scatters reflection, that startles time and chases it into the underbrush of mass distraction, someone has given the receiver the best gift of all: their undivided attention.
The seemingly simple but surprisingly difficult act of paying attention, of observing and listening, of curating the seen, the heard, and placing it in a small mental annex labeled “possible gift items”—this is the gift behind the gift. I’m working on it. One day I will master it. One day. Until then, I channel Bohr and Heisenberg, experiencing my own little uncertainty principle. Until then, I will be saying what I recently said to my wife Kathy: “Have you decided yet what I am getting you for Christmas?”
I have committed unpardonable acts of gift-giving. Were the skin of every inhabitant of this planet a manuscript upon which offenses against the art of gift-giving were inscribed, mine would, as Jonathan Edwards said describing his sinfulness, “heap infinite upon infinite.” Over the years, I have given my wife a set of Revere Ware pots and pans—well, it is cookware with a pedigree stretching back to Paul himself; a 30 pound bag of carrots—well, she does like carrots and they are brimming with Vitamin A; a Subway gift card—well, she is an on-the-go woman with a jones for the grilled chicken on asiago bread; and a massive package containing 72 rolls of toilet paper—well, it was a deal too good to pass up and proof positive that I had mastered the art of the deal. I once pilfered my best friend’s golf shoes, polished them, and gave them to him as a birthday present—a gag gift he found as amusing as a computer virus. I have given my grandkids underwear and socks—you simply cannot have too many of these items, don’t you know. I have given my mom calfskin driving gloves, only to learn that she no longer drove. I have given my dad a box of freshly picked, organically grown strawberries, forgetting, somehow, that he suffered from diverticulosis. I have given a colleague a rather nice California merlot, forgetting, somehow, that his religion proscribed “stimulating” beverages. Somehow, for some reason known only to God or Oprah or Joel Osteen, I have managed to turn the act of gift-giving into an incessantly plucked string of self-reproach. St. Francis of Assisi said that “it is in giving that we receive.” I have received a zettabyte of mortification. Emerson says “The only gift is a portion of thyself.” My portion, it would seem, is capaciously meager.
I could, for solace, turn to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the gift-giving ritual. A self-cancelling paradox, Derrida claims, lies at the heart of gifting. To give a gift is to enter a tangled exchange which incurs an obligation on the receiver’s part, a debt to be repaid, even if that repayment is no more than saying “Thank you.” A gift, to be received as a genuine gift, must disguise itself, must not appear to be a gift, must transcend the fraught cycle of giving and receiving, must locate itself beyond self-interested calculation or strategic deployment. Givers must be anonymous, Derrida concludes, even to themselves, lest they fall prey to the beguiling snare of prideful self-worth. The gift must not be a given thing, and the receivers must have no awareness that they have received a gift. In effect, a genuine gift annuls itself.
Clever, is it not? A swashbuckling concept, philosophically considered, festooned with panache, but, I suspect, of minimal value in chamfering the sharply disappointed looks of my grandkids when they found the raisins and oranges I anonymously placed once in their Christmas stockings. Like so much of postmodern theory, Derrida’s deconstructed gift is all ad hocery, without wider application and as practical as trying to eat a taco with a fondue fork.
The best gifts are really two gifts: that which is given, and, behind it, the unsurpassed gift of attention. The best gifts mean that the receiver has, at some point, been the singular focus of the giver’s concentrated attention and purposeful planning. They mean that the receiver has been placed on the giver’s icon-laden cognitive desktop and singled out, attended to, deliberated on. The best gifts mean that the receiver has been experienced in the consciousness of the giver. They mean someone has watched the receiver wander off to a certain store aisle, linger in front of something. Someone has looked at the receiver looking. The best gifts mean that someone has listened to the receiver talk, wonder, express a frustration, reveal a desire or need or anxiety. Someone has taken in the receiver’s words; someone has made them a part of their awareness and introspection. The best gifts mean that someone has looked and listened and archived that looking and listening away, to be accessed when a gift-giving occasion arrives. The best gifts mean that in an era that scatters reflection, that startles time and chases it into the underbrush of mass distraction, someone has given the receiver the best gift of all: their undivided attention.
The seemingly simple but surprisingly difficult act of paying attention, of observing and listening, of curating the seen, the heard, and placing it in a small mental annex labeled “possible gift items”—this is the gift behind the gift. I’m working on it. One day I will master it. One day. Until then, I channel Bohr and Heisenberg, experiencing my own little uncertainty principle. Until then, I will be saying what I recently said to my wife Kathy: “Have you decided yet what I am getting you for Christmas?”
Sunday, December 12, 2010
The Past Is Not Past
With some frequency lately, shards of bygone times and elsewhere places, unbidden and unannounced, have arrived at my mental doorway, edged their way into the foyer, and then, with a cheek kiss and shoulder clap, stride boldly into the living room. They map the coordinates, the longitude and latitude, of a once world through which I passed and in which I left traces, ghostly connections, specters of before, that have now been aroused from their slumber to echo forth from the well of time. I have been beset by nostalgia, that peculiar archeology which reveals the truth of William Faulkner’s observation in Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”
I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.
And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.
And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.
Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.
Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.
I recently remembered that, at the age of six, I removed half a dozen eggs from the refrigerator, cradled them in cupped hands held against my stomach, opened the front door latch with my elbow, walked to the end of the porch, and lobbed them, deliberately, one at a time, against the gray-clapboarded side of our neighbor’s house—simply because I wanted to hear the sound, the pop and crunch, they made when they burst open. Our neighbor, a kindly older woman, was amused; my mother was aghast and embarrassed, and I tried to argue, vainly, as it turned out, and with only the language that a six-year-old can muster, what I now recognize as the aesthetic motivation of my behavior.
And I recently recalled my father, 700 miles from home, living in a company-owned dormitory while training for a new position at the home office, laid up with a broken ankle suffered from a fall on treacherous Wisconsin ice. Each night, promptly at 8 o’clock, he called my mother. Each night they chatted for 20 to 30 minutes, then my brother and I took turns, answering Dad’s always repeated question about how school went with the always repeated “OK.” And each night I wondered why Dad called so much, how in the space of 24 hours enough new events and experiences could have possibly accumulated to justify a long-distance phone call. Finally, I asked Mom. “He’s lonely, Jerry,” Mom said; “he likes hearing us,” and it took me many years to understand that the poetics of love can lie in the caressing meter of a familiar voice.
And I recently remembered that, as a young high school teacher, the physics teacher and I invented an after-school game that involved a roll of toilet paper wrapped in duct tape and a wastebasket set exactly 25 paces away. Students gathered to watch and speculate on the likely winner of this battle of literature and science. We postured and strutted and trash talked, and had an official been present we would surely have drawn a penalty flag for taunting and excessively testosteroned male display. But the delight of it, the incandescent silliness of it, the sheer exuberant kookiness of it, was galvanizing and joyous, a self-contained enclave of play simply for the sake of the ludic pleasure it provided.
Now, I know, as a Sherman Alexie narrator says, “that nostalgia is dangerous,” and can even be “terminal” if allowed to colonize the present and usurp the here-and-nowness of our passing days. I know, as T. S. Eliot warns, that nostalgia can become “fragments I have shored up against my ruins” or, as John Steinbeck asserts, a declensionist “protest against change.” And I am told that nostalgia is most often prompted by a dejected longing, by a morose yearning for some lost, tinselled Ithaca to which we cannot return. But I experience these unfastened moments of my past as cashmered in charm rather than burlaped in sadness, and if their grammar is based on a syntax of longing, it is, as Longfellow says, a “longing/ That is not akin to pain/ And resembles sorrow only/ As the mist resembles the rain.” My nostalgia, it seems to me, is not a wistful homage to an irrecoverable past, not an anguished wave of farewell, but fully in dialogue with the times, a reminder to continually return to, continually embody, now and everywhere and always, the youthful wonder, the small gestures of love, and the unreservoired silliness it reveals.
Undoubtedly, age summons nostalgia. The trick, I think, is to realize that those memories of the child, the adolescent, or the young adult are not necessarily a home from which we are exiled. They do not necessarily speak in an accent of excommunication. If we let it, age can be a close encounter of the too long kind. If we let it, it folds and faults into a tectonics of sameness. If we let it, the familiarity of it all can hoodwink us into seeing an alarming lack of novelty. The world spins on, life unspools, and the up close everydayness of it all can demystify and disenchant, can cabin us in a Prufrockian room where things simply come and go, can hobble enthusiasm, cause it to lose a step, then two, then finally lag far behind. But if we let it, age can call forth a nostalgia that quickens, rather than cuts us to the quick, by showing us what we were, what we still are, or what we can still become. The past is the past, but only if we let it be.
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